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an&e $*?t&fc Series; 

Books approved by recognized au- 
thorities as containing reliable accounts 
of the mysterious phenomena now under 
investigation by the Societies for Psy- 
chical Research, and conjectures regard- 
ing them by qualified students. 

The series will include some of the 
classics of the subject, either taken from 
the Proceedings of the societies or re- 
printed from editions no longer obtain- 
able. 

The following are already arranged 
for. Others are expected. 

The Unseen Doctor with Preface by 
J. Arthur Hill. 

After Death Communications, by L. 
M. Bazett, with Introduction by J. 
Arthur Hill. 

The Ear of Dionysius by The Right 
Hon. G. W. Balfour, with a discussion 
of the Evidence by Miss F. Melian 
Stawell and a reply by Mr. Balfour. 

The Mediamship of Mr. T. by Anna 
de Koven. (Mrs. Reginald de Koven.) 

Memoirs of a Medium by Erne 
Halsey. (" Mrs. Vernon.") 

My Experiences With Mrs. Piper, by 
Anne Manning Robbins, author of Both 
Sides of the Veil. 

Psychic Studies and Sketches by 
Henry Holt. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

FARTHER SCRIPTS AFFORDING EVIDENCE OF 
PERSONAL SURVIVAL 

BY 

THE RIGHT HON. G. W. BALFOUR 



WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE EVIDENCE 

BY 

MISS F. MELIAN SHAWELL 
AND A REPLY BY MR. BALFOUR 



Reprinted by authority from the Proceedings of the 
Society for Psychical Research 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1920 



y*>0\ 






Copyright 1920 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



/ 



/7 $ 



©CI.A604043 



CONTENTS 



PART I 

PAGE 

Scripts Affording Evidence of Personal 

Survival 3 

Appendix 67 

PART II 
Discussion of the Evidence JJ 

A Paper Read to the Society of Psychical Research 
by Miss F. Melian Stawell. 

PART III 

Discussion of the Evidence (conti .tied) 97 
A Reply by the Right Hon. Gerald W. Balfour. 

PART IV 

Note: On the Analogies Between the 

Statius Case and the Dionysius Case 125 
Index 129 



I. 

THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS : 

Scripts affording Evidence of Personal 
Survival. * 

On the 26th of August, 1910, the automatist who is 
already well known to members of the Society under 
the name of Mrs. Willett sat for script with Mrs. 
Verrall. 

The script produced on this occasion, partly 
written and partly dictated — I use the word script 
for convenience sake to include the spoken as well 
as the written word — contained the phrase " Diony- 
sius' Ear the lobe." The phrase occurred in the dic- 
tated part of the script, and the name Dionysius 
was pronounced as in Italian. It has no obvious 
relevance to the context, and this first appearance 
of it in Willett Script remains even now without 
any satisfactory explanation. 

To Mrs. Verrall herself, as we shall see presently, 
the words conveyed at the time no meaning what- 

1 This Paper was read at a meeting of the Society for 
Psychical Research on November 9th, 1916, substantially in 
the form in which it is now published, except that consid- 
erable additions have been made to the argumentative por- 
tion. 

3 



4 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

ever. As a good many of my audience may be in 
like case with her, I had best explain at the outset 
that the Ear of Dionysius is a kind of grotto hewn 
in the solid rock at Syracuse and opening on one 
of the stone-quarries which served as a place of 
captivity for the Athenian prisoners of war who 
fell into the hands of the victorious Syracusans 
after the failure of the famous siege so graphically 
described by Thucydides. A few years later these 
quarries were again used as prisons by the elder 
Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse. The grotto of 
which I have spoken has the peculiar acoustic proper- 
ties of a whispering gallery, and is traditionally be- 
lieved to have been constructed or utilised by the 
Tyrant in order to overhear, himself unseen, the 
conversations of his prisoners. Partly for this rea- 
son, and partly from a fancied resemblance to the 
interior of a donkey's ear, it came to be called 
L'Orecchio di Dionisio, or the Ear of Dionysius; 
but the name only dates from the sixteenth century. 
The grotto is still one of the objects of interest 
which every visitor to Syracuse is taken to see. 

No further reference was made in any Willett 
Script to the Ear of Dionysius until more than three 
years later. The subject was first revived in a 
script written in the presence of Sir Oliver Lodge 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 5 

on the 10th of January, 19 14. The sitting was a 
very long one, and in the course of it occurred the 
following passage. 

A. 

(Extract from Script of Jan. 10, 1914.) 

Do you remember you did not know and I 
complained of your classical ignorance Ignor- 
ance 

It concerned a place where slaves were kept — 
and Audition belongs, also Acoustics 

Think of the Whispering Gaily 

To toil, a slave, the Tyrant — and it was called 
Orecchio — that's near 

One Ear, a one eared place, not a one horsed 
dawn [here the automatist laughed slightly], a 
one eared place — You did not know (or re- 
member) about it when it came up in conver- 
sation, and I said Well what is the use of a 
classical education — 

Where were the fields of Enna 

[Drawing of an ear.] 

an ear ly pipe could be heard 

To sail for Syracuse 

Who beat the loud-sounding wave, who smote 
the moving furrows 

The heel of the Boot 

Dy Dy and then you think of Diana Di- 
morphism 

To fly to find Euripides 

not the Pauline Philemon 

This sort of thing is more difficult to do than 
it looked. 



6 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

There are several interesting points to be noted in 
connection with this passage. Earlier in the script 
it was stated that a message was to be sent to Mrs. 
Verrall; but at the point where the extract com- 
mences, Mrs. Verrall is directly addressed in the 
second person, although she was not herself present. 
The communication must be taken as purporting to 
come from Dr. A. W. Verrall, the incident recalled 
in the extract having actually happened very much 
as described. I will relate it in the words of Mrs. 
Verrall's own note, written on Jan. 19, 19 14, after, 
this portion of the script had been shown to her. 

My typed note on the Willett Script of Aug. 
26, 1910, is as follows : " ' Dionysius' Ear the 
lobe ' is unintelligible to me. A. W. V. says it 
is the name of a place at Syracuse where D. 
could overhear conversations." This makes clear 
what was instantly recalled to me on hearing 
the Willett Script of Jan. 10, that I did not 
know, or had forgotten, what the Ear of Dion- 
ysius was, and that I asked A. W. V. to ex- 
plain it. I cannot say whether on that occasion 
he asked " What is the use of a classical edu- 
cation?" but he expressed considerable surprise 
at my ignorance, and the phrase of the script 
recalls — though it does not, I think, reproduce — 
similar remarks of his on like occasions. 

The incident to me is very striking. I am 
quite sure that Mrs. Willett was not present 
when I asked A. W. V. about the Ear of Dion- 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 7 

ysius; no one was present except A. W. V. and 
myself. . . . She therefore had no reason to sup- 
pose that on this particular subject, of the Ear 
of Dionysius, my information had been obtained 
from A. W. V. On the other hand, the form 
given to my contemporary note — " A. W. V. 
says etc." — confirms my own vivid recollection 
of the incident above described. It is not easy, 
I think, to devise a more convincing single in- 
cident. 

The incident is certainly striking; but I have to 
confess that its evidential force is weakened by a 
dim though haunting recollection on my part of a 
conversation having taken place between Mrs. Wil- 
lett and me sometime previously on this very subject 
of Dionysius' Ear. She has no memory of it her- 
self; but I still think she told me one day that the 
words " Ear of Dionysius " had been running in 
her head, and asked me what they meant ; whereupon 
I explained, adding that they had come in one of 
her own scripts several years before. I do not be- 
lieve I referred to Mrs. Verrall, or to Dr. Verrall's 
having rallied her upon her ignorance. But as I 
had been told of the incident by Mrs. Verrall her- 
self shortly after it occurred, it is just possible I 
may have done so; and this possibility spoils what 
would otherwise have been a good piece of evidence. 

Returning now to the extract from the Willett 



8 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Script of Jan. 10, 1914, 1 proceed to apply a running 
commentary to the other allusions, certain or prob- 
able, which it contains. 

The "place where slaves were kept" refers of 
course to the stone-quarries where the Athenian 
captives were imprisoned. The words that follow 
describe the Ear of Dionysius, with its peculiar 
acoustic properties. Dionysius himself is not named 
either in this or in the succeeding scripts to which I 
shall presently call attention; though the syllables 
" Dy Dy " towards the end of the extract probably 
represent an attempt at the name. The use of the 
Italian for Ear, Orecchio, is noteworthy, and recalls 
the Italian pronounciation of " Dionysius " in the 
earlier script. I may say that Mrs. Willett knows 
Italian and has spent some time in Italy, though she 
has never been in Sicily. Much play is made later 
on with the phrase " a one-eared place." It seems 
to have little point in the present extract save to 
bring in our old friend the " one-horsed dawn " — 
an appropriate reminiscense for Dr. Verrall, as 
readers of the Proceedings will not require to be 
told. 1 Sir Oliver Lodge's record tells us that the 

^^The words "a one-horsed dawn" refer to a telepathic 
experiment tried by Dr. Verrall in his life-time on Mrs. 
Verrall, of which a full account was published by her in 
Proceedings S.P.R., Vol. XX., pp. 156-167. See also Pro- 
ceedings, Vol. XXVII., pp. 237-238. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 9 

automatist laughed as she wrote " not a one-horsed 
dawn." From my experience of Willett Script I 
have no doubt that the laugh represents amusement 
on the part of the communicator, not on that of the 
automatist herself. It is Dr. Verrall — or the per- 
sonality purporting to be Dr. Verrall — who laughs 
as he transmits the words; the laughter of the auto- 
matist is but an echo. 

The meadows of Enna, a town in Sicily, were 
famous in antiquity as the scene of the Rape of 
Proserpine. They are introduced here either to 
indicate Sicily as the country with which the mes- 
sage is concerned, or, more probably, to add to the 
various literary and historical associations which are 
piled up in this and the immediately succeeding 
scripts. 

Another such association, and a strangely far- 
fetched one, seems to be dragged in in the next line 
" An ear ly pipe could he heard." The allusion here 
is apparently to the lines in Tennyson's well-known 
poem " Tears, idle tears : " 1 

" The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
To dying ears." 

1 Since this Paper was written it has been suggested to 
rafe that the "pipe" is the shepherd's pipe, and that the 
allusion is to Theocritus, the famous Sicilian bucolic poet. 
Theocritus is said to have imitated the Cyclops of Phil- 
oxenus in his eleventh idyll. 



io THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

The bringing of this poem into forced connection 
with the Ear of Dionysius, and that by means of 
an abominable pun, is certainly not characteristic 
of the automatist. I doubt however whether Dr. 
Verrall's intimates would scout it as a sally impos- 
sible to his more playful moments. Indeed, there 
may even be an evidential point about the jest; 
for Mrs. Verrall writes in her contemporary note : 
" The non-serious or parody-like introduction of 
this poem is consistent with the feeling of the sup- 
posed communicator; A. W. V. always considered 
the sentiment of the poem somewhat overstrained, 
and maintained that that view was warranted by 
Tennyson's own description of Ida's reception of it 
' with some disdain,' as a fancy ' hatched in silken 
folded idleness.' " 

The next reference in the script is almost cer- 
tainly to the ill-fated Athenian expedition against 
Syracuse. The words " who beat the loud-sounding 
wave, who smote the moving furrows " are probably 
reminiscent of Tennyson's Ulysses: 

" Sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows," 

though I do not think that any allusion to Ulysses 

is intended here, in spite of the fact that he plays, 

I am still inclined to prefer the explanation given in the 
text. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS n 

as we shall see, an important part in subsequent de- 
velopments. " The heel of the Boot " may be taken 
to indicate the route followed by the Athenian fleet, 
which passed from Corcyra to Tarentum in the heel 
of Italy, thence coasted along to the toe, and so 
reached Sicily. 

" Dy Dy " I have already explained as probably 
an attempt at the name Dionysius. The communi- 
cator fails to get the whole name through, and then 
addressing the automatist, who repeats his language, 
reproaches her with thinking of words beginning 
with Di which are not what he wants. 

The final allusion in the extract calls for a some- 
what longer comment. A script written by Mrs. 
Holland in 1907 contains the words " To fly to find 
Euripides Philemon." The script is quoted by Mr. 
Piddington in Volume XXII. of the Proceedings 
(p. 215), and the source of the reference to 
Euripides and Philemon given — namely, Brown- 
ing's Aristophanes' Apology or the Last Adventure 
of Balaustion. 

In Aristophanes' Apology [writes Mr. Pidding- 
ton] Balaustion tells to Philemon the story of 
how, on the night on which news of the death 
of Euripides reached Athens, Aristophanes, 
flushed with wine and with the success of his 
Thesmophoriazousce came to her house and there 
justified his attacks on the dead poet ; and of 
how, the apology ended, Balaustion read to Aris- 



12 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

tophanes and the assembled company the Her- 
cules Furens, the original tablets of which Euri- 
pides had presented to her as a parting gift. 
The poem ends by Balaustion telling Philemon 
that she sent the original tablets to Dionysius, 
tyrant of Sicily, who placed them in a temple 
of Apollo with this inscription: 

" I also loved 
The poet, Free Athenai cheaply prized — 
King Dionusios, — Archelaos like." 
Balaustion then asks Philemon 
"If he too have not made a votive verse ! " 
and Philemon replies: 

" Grant, in good sooth, our great dead, all the 
same, 
Retain their sense, as certain wise men say, 
Fd hang myself — to see Euripides/' 

Mrs. Willet has not read Aristophanes' 'Apology. 
She had, however, seen the Holland Script, and 
recognised at that time that her own script had bor- 
rowed from it. She had also read parts of Vol. 
XXII. of the Proceedings, and may have seen the 
passage I have just quoted. From the evidential 
point of view we must assume that she had seen it, 
and that she may thus have become aware of a con- 
nection between Browning's Philemon and the ty- 
rant Dionysius. On the other hand, it would not be 
legitimate to infer that this literary contribution to 
the subject in hand must have proceeded from her 
own mental activities unprompted by any external 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 13 

influence. Whatever view we take of the genuine- 
ness or otherwise of the supposed communicators 
and communications, it is clear that what is already 
in the mind, conscious or subconscious, of the auto- 
matist, will also be that which will most easily 
emerge in automatic speech or writing. 

In any case the reference to Browning's poem is 
aptly chosen. Not only does it bring in Dionysius 
the Tyrant in the manner described, but also, though 
indirectly, the two other main topics alluded to in 
the script, namely, the Athenian expedition against 
Syracuse, and the stone-quarries where the Athenian 
prisoners worked until they were sold as slaves or 
released because they were able to recite Euripides. 
The second " Adventure " of Balaustion inevitably 
recalls the first, related in the companion poem ; and 
the first adventure starts from the defeat of the 
Athenian Expedition, and ends with Balaustion 
seeking safety for herself and her whole ship's 
company from the threatened hostility of the Syra- 
cusans by the exercise of a similar gift of recitation. 

One other point is perhaps worthy of mention. 
Browning's line 1 

" I'd hang myself — to see Euripides." 
is misquoted by Mrs. Holland, and after her by 

i-This line is an almost literal translation from a frag- 
ment of Philemon which has come down to us. 



14 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Mrs. Willett in the form " To fly to find Euripides." 
I owe to Mrs. Verrall the suggestion that the remark 
in the Willett Script, about " this sort of thing " 
being " more difficult to do than it looked/' is due 
to a recognition by the communicator of the mis- 
quotation — a misquotation which in his life-time 
Dr. Verrall, " who was much interested in Mrs. 
Holland's allusion to Lucus and Philemon, never 
failed to note and regret." 

So far all is plain sailing. The reproduction of 
what Dr. Verrall said to Mrs. Verrall anent the 
Ear of Dionysius it is possible to explain in the man- 
ner I have suggested. The other allusions, histori- 
cal, geographical and literary, have a natural con- 
nection; and all of them might be supposed, without 
any rude violation of probability, to have been at 
one time or another within the normal knowledge of 
the automatist. But up to now we have only been 
laying foundations for what is to follow. In the 
succeeding scripts the plot begins to thicken. 

Before I enter upon these further developments 
it will not be out of place to make a brief statement 
concerning the conditions in which the Willett 
Scripts are produced. Many of these are written 
when the automatist is alone, awake, and fully 
aware of her surroundings. The remainder, pro- 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 15 

duced in the presence of a " sitter,'' x fall mainly 
into two classes. Either the automatist is in a 
normal or nearly normal state of consciousness, 
much as when she writes scripts by herself, or else 
she is in a condition of trance. There have been a 
few intermediate cases, when it is hard to say 
whether the sensitive is in trance or not. But these 
are a very small number: in general there is no 
difficulty whatever in distinguishing. Scripts ob- 
tained in a normal state of consciousness, whether 
in presence of a sitter or alone, are always annotated 
by Mrs. Willett shortly after they have been pro- 
duced. The originals are carefully preserved in the 
custody of the investigating group; but she keeps 
copies to which she can at any time refer. Of 
scripts produced in trance, on the other hand, she 
remembers nothing, even immediately after waking; 
and the contents are carefully kept from her know- 
ledge. The script of Aug. 26, 1910, in which the 
first reference to the Ear of Dionysius occurred, 
was a trance-script. That of Jan. 10, 19 14, from 
which Extract A has been taken, was written in 

a A few of Mrs. Willett's scripts have been produced in 
the presence of some member of her family, and two in 
the presence of a friend who does not belong to the investi- 
gating group. Apart from these rare occasions, she has 
never sat for automatic writing save with Mrs. Verrall, Sir 
Oliver Lodge, or myself; and never at any time in the 
presence of more than one person. 



16 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

normal conditions of consciousness. All the re- 
maining scripts I shall have occasion to quote in 
this Paper were trance-scripts. Until May of this 
year (1916), Mrs. Willett had never been shown 
any of them or any portion of any of them : there 
is no doubt in my own mind that in a normal state 
of consciousness she was totally ignorant of their 
contents. In that month I allowed her to see, not 
the entire scripts, but just those passages which I 
am about to cite, and which have been printed for 
distribution among the audience. The date of the 
last of these scripts was August 19, 191 5. It is 
clear, therefore, that Mrs. Willett's having been 
shown the extracts nine months later could in no 
way weaken any " evidential " value which the epi- 
sode they relate to may be thought to possess. 

I now proceed to read and comment on Extract 
B from the Willett sitting of Feb. 28, 191 4, at 
which I was myself present. 

B. 

(Extracts from Sitting of Feb. 28, 1914.) 
(Present: G. W. B.) 

Some confusion may appear in the matter 
transmitted but there is now being started an 
experiment not a new experiment but a new sub- 
ject and not exactly that but a new line which 
joins with a subject already got through 

a little anatomy if you please 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Add one to one 

One Ear X [sic] one eye 



17 




the one eyed Kingdom 

No, in the K of the Blind the 1 eyed man is 

King 

It is about a 1 eyed man * 1 eyed 
The entrance to the Cave Arethusa 
Arethusa is only to indicate it does not belong 

to the 1 eyed 

A Fountain on the Hill Side 




What about Baulastion [sic] 




man " crossed out in the original. 



18 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

[Laughs] Supposed to be a Wellington Boot 
12 little nigger boys thinking not of Styx 
Some were eaten up and then there were Six 
Six. 



[At this point Mrs. Willett ceased to write 
and began dictating to the Sitter.] 

Some one said— Oh I'll try, I'll try. Oh! 
Some one's showing me a picture and talking 
at the same time. 

Some one said to me, Homer — and some one 
said — I'm so confused, I'm all with things flit- 
ting past me; I don't seem to catch them. Oh 
dear! 

Nor sights nor sounds diurnal. 
Here where all winds are quiet. 1 

Oh! 

Edmund says, Powder first and jam after- 
wards. You see it seems a long time since I was 
here with them — and I want to talk to them and 
enjoy myself. And I've all the time to keep on 
working, and seeing and listening to such boring 
old— 

Oh, ugh! [Expression of great disgust.] 

Somebody said, Give her time, Give her 
time . . . Oh, if I could only say it quickly and 
get done with it. It's about a cave, and a group 
of men. Somebody then — a trident, rather like 
a toasting fork / think. 

Poseidon, Poseidon. 

1 Swinburne: The Garden of Proserpine^ 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 19 

Who was it said, It may be that the gulfs will 
wash us down — find the great Achilles that we 
knew? 1 He's got a flaming torch in his hand. 



And then some one said to me, Can't you think 
of Noah and the grapes? 

Optics — Oh! that, you know [putting a finger 
to her eye]. 

Oh, if I could only say what I hear! Oh, I 
will try, I will try. 

Somebody said to me, Don't forget about 
Henry Sidgwick, that he pleased not himself. Do 
you know he used to work when he hated work- 
ing. I mean sometimes he had to grind along 
without enjoying what he was doing. That's 
what I'm trying to do now. 

Do you know that man with the glittering eyes 
I once saw? He hit me with one word now. 
[Here Mrs. Willett traced a word with one fin- 
ger along the margin of the paper. I failed to 
make it out, and handed the pencil to her, where- 
upon she wrote] 

Aristotle 

[Dictation resumed] And Poetry, the language 
of the Gods. Somebody killed a President once 
and call out — something in Latin, and I only 
heard one word of it, Tironus, Tiranus, Tiranius 
— something about sic. 2 

1 Tennyson : Ulysses. 

2 Sic semper tyrannis — uttered by Booth when he mur- 
dered President Lincoln. The phrase had already appeared 
in Mrs. Piper's trance of Apr. 17, 1907. See Proceedings, 
Vol. XXIV., p. 30. 



20 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

What is a tyrant? 

Lots of wars — A Siege [spoken loud and with 
emphasis]. I hear the sound of chipping. [Here 
Mrs. W. struck the fingers of one hand repeatedly 
against the palm of the other.] It's on stone. 
Now, wait a minute. Oh, if I could only get 
that word. 

Fin and something gleba. Find [pronounced 
as in the Latin finditur] — oh! it's got to do with 
the serf. It's about that man who said it was 
better — oh! a shade among the shades. Better 
to be a slave among the living, he said. 1 

Oh, the toil — Woe to the vanquished. 

That one eye has got something to do with the 
one ear. [Sighs] That's what they wanted me 
to say. There's such a mass of things, you see, 
rushing through my mind that I can't catch any- 
thing. 

[A pause and then sobbing] He was turned into 
a fountain that sort of Stephen man, he was 
turned into a fountain. Why? that's the point: 
Why? . . . 

Oh, dear me ! Now I seem to be walking about 
a school, and I meet a dark boy, and — it's the 
name of a Field Marshal I'm trying to get, a 
German name. And then something says, All 
this is only memories revived: it's got nothing to 
do with the purely literary — There are two peo- 
ple in that literary thing, chiefly concerned in it. 
They're very close friends — they've thought it all 
out together. 

1 Spoken by the shade of Achilles to Ulysses in Hades. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 21 

Somebody said something about Father Cam 
walking arm in arm — with the Canongate?! 
What does that mean? 

Oh! [sniffing] what a delicious scent! 

No rosebud yet by dew empearled. 

I'll try and say it. Hold me tight now while 
I try and say it. [Pause.] 

It may take some considerable time to get the 
necessary references through. But let us peg 
away; and keep your provisional impressions to 
yourself. May 1 is to hear nothing of all this at 
present; because this is something good and worth 
doing, and my Aristotelian friend — 

[At this point the subject is abruptly broken 
off and not referred to again until the very end, 
when E. G. (Gurney) intervenes to close the sit- 
ting.] 

Enough for this time. There is sense in that 
which has been got through though some disen- 
tanglement, is needed. A Literary Association of 
ideas pointing to the influence of two discarnate 
minds. 

You will doubtless have noticed the recurrence 
in this extract of most if not all of the topics al- 
ready found in Extract A. I will briefly enumerate 
but need not dwell on them further. References 
are once more made to 

The Ear of Dionysius; 

The stone-quarries in which the vanquished 
Athenians worked; 
I i u May"=Mrs. Verrall. 



22 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Enna (by means of a quotation from The 

Garden of Proserpine"; 
Syracuse ("Wars — a Siege," and " A're- 

thusa"); 
The heel of Italy (Wellington Boot). 
The Adventures of Balaustion. 
There is also, however, much in the Extract that 
is new. 

We are now told that an " experiment " is being 
attempted ; and that this experiment consists in " a 
literary association of ideas," some of which have 
already appeared, w T hile others are now being intro- 
duced for the first time. Much importance is at- 
tached to the experiment : it is " something good and 
worth doing." There are additional references yet 
to come, which may take a " considerable time " to 
" get through." Meanwhile Mrs. Verrall (" May ") 
is not to be told about it : any provisional impres- 
sions the other investigators may form are to be 
kept to themselves. 

The literary riddle — for such it proves ultimately 
to be — which is thus in the course of being pro- 
pounded is the work, we are told, of two intimate 
friends no longer in the flesh. It is intended to be 
characteristic of them, and to serve as evidence of 
their personal survival. 

The identity of the two friends, indicated without 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 23 

disguise in the later extracts, is made sufficiently 
clear even in the present one to anybody acquainted 
with previous Willett Scripts. They are Professor 
S. H. Butcher and Dr. A. W. Verrall. * 

The " man with the glittering eyes I once saw," 
from whom proceeds the word Aristotle, is Pro- 
fessor Butcher, The incident referred to is a vision 
of Professor Butcher seen by Mrs. Willett on the 
night of Jan. 21, 191 1, a few weeks after his death. 
I quote the record of it made by Mrs. Willett on the 
day following: 

" Last night after I had blown out my candle and 
was just going to sleep I became aware of the pre- 
sence of a man, a stranger, and — almost at the 
same moment — knew it was Henry Butcher. I felt 
his personality very living, clear, strong, sweetness 
and strength combined. A piercing glance. He 
made no introduction, and said nothing. So I said 
to him : ' Are you Henry Butcher ? ' He said ' No, 
I am Henry Butcher's ghost/ I was rather shocked 
at his saying this and said, ' Oh, very well, I'm 
not at all afraid of ghosts or of the dead/ He 
said, ' Ask Verrall if he remembers our last con- 
versation, and say the word to him : 

Ek e tee/ " 

1 Professor Butcher died in December, 1910, and Dr. Ver- 
rall in June, 1912. 



24 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

A more detailed reference to this vision will be 
found in Extract D. I do not discuss it here further 
than to say that the name of the goddess Hecate — 
for that is apparently what is meant — has a signifi- 
cance in connection with Dr. Verrall which would 
have been known to Professor Butcher. In the 
present context the incident is apparently recalled 
only to serve as a clue to the identity of the man who 
says ' Aristotle.' The word 'Aristotle/ combined 
with 'Poetry/ is itself an additional clue; for 
Butcher wrote a work upon Aristotle's Poetics 
which is well known to all classical scholars. Hence 
the description of him as " my Aristotelian friend " 
given later on in the extract. 

Two other symbolic references to Prof. Butcher 
are contained in Extract B. " Father Cam walking 
arm in arm with the Canongate " signifies the asso- 
ciation, in the persons of Verrall and Butcher, of 
the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. 
Butcher was himself a highly distinguished Cam- 
bridge man, and in later life represented his Uni- 
versity in the House of Commons; but he was also 
for many years Professor of Greek at Edinburgh. 

The Rose, and the perfume of the Rose are re- 
peatedly used in Willett Scripts as symbols of Prof. 
Butcher, for a reason which his personal friends 
will readily understand. We shall come across the 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 25 

same symbols again in Extract D. Note that here 
the automatist seems to become conscious of the 
scent before she connects it with the flower. " No 
rosebuds yet by dew impearled " is a quotation from 
Swinburne's Etude Realiste, with the substitution 
of "dew" for "dawn." 

Mrs. Willett, it may be as well to say, had never 
met Professor Butcher. She knew him, however, 
by name, and knew that he was a close friend of 
the Verralls. 

As regards Dr. Verrall, there is only one direct 
allusion to him in Extract B apart from the Father 
Cam reference already mentioned; but that one is 
unmistakable. The automatist says she seems to 
be walking about a school and to meet a dark boy. 
She tries to get the name of a German Field Mar- 
shal. " Then something says, All this is only mem- 
ories revived; it has nothing to do with the purely 
literary thing " in which the two friends are closely 
concerned. 

The school is Wellington; the dark boy is Ver- 
rall; the memories revived are his memories. The 
German Field Marshal is Blikher, whose name was 
given to one of the college dormitories. Mrs. Wil- 
lett probably knew that Verrall was educated at 
Wellington; and she certainly had had the oppor- 
tunity of knowing that one of the College dormi- 



26 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

tories was named after Blucher, as this circumstance 
was mentioned in the notes to a script of Mrs. 
Verrall's which she had seen. The passage gives 
no ground for inferring a knowledge supernorm- 
ally imparted though it effectively serves its purpose 
of designating a particular individual. 

To resume: We have now learnt that the subjects 
associated together in Extract A and reproduced in 
Extract B are intended to find their place in some 
kind of literary scheme carefully thought out and 
devised by two friends who in their lifetime were 
eminent classical scholars. They are, as it were, 
pieces which have to be fitted into a single whole 
more or less after the manner of a jig-saw puzzle. 
The tale of pieces, however, is not yet complete. 
Two additional subjects of great importance lie 
embedded in Extract B, and my next task must be 
to disengage them. They are the stories of Poly- 
phemus and Ulysses, and of Acis and Galatea — the 
first derived from Homer's Odyssey, the second 
from Ovid's Metamorphoses? though best known 
to most people through the famous musical setting 
of the tale by Handel. 

In the story told by Homer, Ulysses is overtaken 
by a storm on his voyage home from Troy, and 

iBook xiii. 738 ff. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 27 

driven to the country of the Lotus Eaters. He 
reaches next the land of the Cyclopes, 1 a race of 
one-eyed giants to whom the laws of hospitality are 
unknown. Going ashore with twelve of his com- 
panions he enters the cave where dwells one of the 
giants, by name Polyphemus, a son of the sea-god 
Poseidon. Polyphemus is away tending his flocks 
and herds, but returns towards evening, and, dis- 
covering the strangers, imprisons them in his cave, 
and proceeds to devour them two at a time in three 
successive meals. But Ulysses and his six remain- 
ing companions have devised a terrible revenge. 
They prepare a stake of olive wood with its end 
sharpened to a point ; and having made the Cyclops 
dead drunk with wine they had brought from the 
ship, plunge the end of the stake into the embers, 
and bore out the monster's single eye with its glow- 
ing point. Next morning when the blinded giant 
rolls away the stone from the mouth of the cave 
to let his flock pass out himself remaining in the 
doorway to catch his tormentors, Ulysses and his 
companions escape from his clutches concealed be- 
neath the bellies of the sheep and clinging to their 
fleeces. 

The allusions to this story are scattered in a fine 

1 Ancient tradition placed the Cyclopes in Sicily. Homer 
himself is silent on the point. 



28 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

confusion through the script; but once we have the 
key in our hand there is no difficulty in detecting 
them. The one eye, the "12 little nigger boys think- 
ing not of Styx, Some were eaten up and then 
there were six," the reference to Homer, to a cave 
and a group of men, to Poseidon with his trident, 
to the flaming torch, to Noah and the grapes — all 
fall into place once we realize that they belong 
to the story of Ulysses and Polyphemus. 

The allusion to the meeting of Ulysses in the 
Underworld with " the great Achilles whom we 
knew " seems at first sight irrelevant. I suspect it 
is only a roundabout way of suggesting Ulysses 
himself. The actual names of the two principal 
characters in the story are never mentioned; and 
the same remark applies to the story of Acis and 
Galatea. In this tale, as in the other, the one-eyed 
Cyclops plays the part of villain of the piece. Acis, 
a shepherd dwelling at the foot of Mount Etna, and 
Galatea the sea nymph, are lovers. Unfortunately 
for them, Galatea is also beloved of the " monster 
Polypheme," as Handel's libretto calls him. Rejected 
by the nymph, and mad with jealousy, he hurls a 
mighty rock at his rival and crushes him to death. 
Galatea cannot save her lover, but she gives him a 
kind of immortality by changing him into the stream 
which bears his name and has its source in a fountain 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 29 

issuing from the rock beneath which he was over- 
whelmed. 

Two passages in Extract B refer to this story. 
The first speaks of " a Fountain on the hill side," 
followed by a rough drawing intended for a volcano. 
The second occurs towards the end of the Extract : 
" He was turned into a fountain that sort of Stephen 
man, he was turned into a fountain. Why? that's 
the point : Why? " " That sort of Stephen man " 
describes, of course, the manner in which Acis came 
by his death. To the question Why? an answer 
is given in Extract C. There is a point in it, but a 
point which only becomes intelligible when the whole 
of the riddle has been read. 

Up to this stage the riddle remains a riddle still. 
At all events, it did so for me. We are told to join 
the one ear to the one eye; but I doubt if any one 
in this room can say how the Ear of Dionysius and 
the stone quarries of Syracuse are connected with 
the stories of Polyphemus and Ulysses and of Acis 
and Galatea except by the geographical accident of 
their all belonging to Sicily. Such a mere geograph- 
ical unity would hardly justify the communicators 
in describing their scheme as " something good 
and worth doing " which it had taken the united 
industry of two distinguished scholars to think 
out. 



30 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Let us see what assistance we can get from the 
next script. 

C 

(Extract from Script of March 2, 1914.) 

(Present: G. W. B.) 

The Aristotelian to the Hegelian friend greet- 
ing. Also the Rationalist to the Hegelian friend 
greeting. 1 These twain be about a particular task 
and now proceed with it. 




a Zither that belongs the sound also stones 
the toil of prisoners and captives beneath the 
Tyrant's rod 

The Stag not Stag, do go on 

Stagyr write rite 

[Here Mrs. W. ceased writing and proceeded 
to dictate.] 

Somebody said to me Mousike. 

Do you know, it's an odd thing, I can see Ed- 
mund as if he were working something; and the 
thing he is working is me. It isn't really me, you 

!"The Aristotelian friend" is S. H. Butcher. "The 
Rationalist friend " is A. W. Verrall, possibly with allusion 
to his book Euripides the Rationalist. " The Hegelian 
friend " is myself. It would have been natural for Butcher 
and Verrall so to describe me in old Cambridge days. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 31 

know; it's only a sort of asleep me that I can 
look at. He's very intent — and those two men I 
don't know. One's very big and tall, with a black 
beard. The other man I don't see so well. But 
he holds up a book to me. 

Oh ! Somebody wrote a book about something, 
and this man, who's holding up the book, wrote 
a book about him. And the reference he wants 
isn't just now to what he wrote, but to what this 
person he wrote about wrote. 

What does Ars Poetica mean? 

Edmund said to me Juvenal also wrote satires — 
and then he laughed and said, Good shot. 

The pen is mightier than the sword. Oh, it's 
so confusing — stones belong, and so does a pen. 
Oh! 

Somebody said, Try her with the David story. 
She might get it that way. The man he sent to 
battle hoping he'd get killed, because he wanted 
him out of the way. 

A green-eyed monster. 

Now, all of a sudden I had it. Jealousy, that 
first infirmity of petty minds. 

What does Sicilian Artemis 1 mean? [Pause.] 

Such an odd old human story of long ago 

He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear. 

What is an ear made for? 

Oh, this old bothersome rubbish is so tiresome. 

[As she said this Mrs. W. banged her arms 
down in the table as if in disgust. Presently she 

1 Perhaps a reference to Artemis Alphaea (or Alpheia), 
who had a temple at Syracuse, and was associated with the 
story of the nymph Arethusa. See under Alpheus in the 
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 



32 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

seized my pencil and drew the same figure as in 
the previous sitting, of an ear and the oval of a 
face. From this point onwards she wrote instead 
of dictating.] 




Find the centre [Here she added the eye.] 

Not to you to Golden numbers golden num- 
bers, 1 but add i to i two singles, dissimilar things, 
but both found normally in pairs in human anat- 
omy — Good. 

Gurney says she has done enough now but there 
is more, much more, later. Until the effort is 
completed the portions as they come are not to be 
seen by any other automatist. 

E.G. 

After what has already been said there is compara- 
tively little in this extract that requires further ex- 
planation. Nevertheless some important additions 
are made in it to the stock of materials at our 
disposal. 

First, an answer has been given to the emphatic 
question asked in the previous script concerning the 
cause which led to Acis having been changed into 

^•From Dekker's Patient Grissel: "To add to golden num- 
bers golden numbers." There seems to be no special point 
in the quotation here. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 33 

a fountain. The cause was Jealousy — a lover's 
jealousy, like that which sent Uriah to perish in the 
forefront of battle. Jealousy, then, is one of the 
pieces which have to be fitted into the finished picture 
of our jig-saw puzzle. 

Next, mention is made for the first time of a 
Zither — the sound of which instrument, we are 
told, " belongs " — also of Mousike, the Greek word 
for the Art of Music. Further, the references to 
Aristotle seem to carry with them a significance 
beyond what they possessed in the previous script. 
There they appeared to serve merely as a symbol of 
S. H. Butcher. Here they are apparently introduced 
on their own account as well. " The Stagirite " is 
a correct description of Aristotle, who was born at 
Stageira, a seaport in Macedonia. It would seem, 
however, an odd title to use in this place unless with 
the deliberate purpose of inviting attention. Again, 
a few sentences later it is explicitly stated that a 
reference is wanted not to what Butcher wrote about 
Aristotle, but to something which Aristotle himself 
wrote; and we are left to infer from the words 
Ars Poetica which follow that this something is to 
be found in Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry. 

Lastly, a rather quaint transition leads up to yet 
another new subject. The Latin words Ars Poetica 
to a classical scholar suggest Horace more readily 



34 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

than Aristotle. Horace is not actually named; but 
the thought of him is clearly implied in the inter- 
polated remark attributed to Edmund Gurney, 
" Juvenal also wrote Satires." " Juvenal also " 
must mean " Juvenal as well as Horace." Aristotle, 
I need hardly say, did not write satires. 

We have here, I think, one of those subtle touches 
not uncommon in Mrs. Willett's automatic produc- 
tions, and making strongly for their genuineness. 
The idea which the communicator wants to " get 
through " is that of Satire. The name of Juvenal, 
the Satirist par excellence — a name which has pre- 
viously occurred in Willett Script — serves as a 
stepping-stone, by means of an association familiar 
to any educated person. On the other hand, the 
train of association which leads from Aristotle's 
Poetics to Juvenal, using Horace as an unexpressed- 
middle term, seems to me altogether foreign to Mrs. 
Willett, and outside the scope of any knowledge with 
which she can reasonably be credited. 

At the risk of over-refining I venture further to 
suggest that the transition to Juvenal was an im- 
promptu one for the communicator himself. It 
occurs to him on the spur of the moment as a 
" happy thought " ; and it is this as well as its suc- 
cess in eliciting the required idea of satire that makes 
him laughingly describe it as a " good shot." 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 33 

The notion of satire is continued in the words 
that immediately follow : " The pen is mightier 
than the sword. . . . stones belong and so does a 
pen." As they stand these words are rather obscure ; 
but the sequel shows that the " stones " are the 
stones of the quarry-prisons, and the pen is the pen 
of a satirist. 

Let me now recapitulate. The scripts have fur- 
nished us with a number of disjointed topics: the 
problem is to combine them into a literary unity. 

Here is list of the leading topics so far given : 

The Ear of Dionysius. 

The stone-quarries of Syracuse in which prison- 
ers were confined. 
The story of Polyphemus and Ulysses. 
The story of Acis and Galatea. 
Jealousy. 

Music and the sound of a musical instrument. 
Something to be found in Aristotle's Poetics. 
Satire. 

I have already compared these topics to the sepa- 
rate piece in a jig-saw puzzle. They might perhaps 
be still more aptly likened to the letters in a letter- 
game. Each letter has a significance of its own; 
their joint significance is only realised when the 



36 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

word they together spell has been discovered. The 
whole is more than the sum of its parts. 

Now obviously, if one or more of the parts are 
missing the difficulty of divining the whole is pro- 
gressively increased. Extract C, you will notice, ends 
with an intimation that more is to come, and re- 
peats the injunction, already given as respects Mrs. 
Verrall, but now made general, that the portions 
as they come are not to be shewn to any other auto- 
matist until the effort is completed. Mr. Piddington 
and I, who were studying the scripts were accord- 
ingly content to wait without troubling our heads 
overmuch about an answer to the conundrum, until 
more light should be vouchsafed, either by further 
scripts from Mrs. Willett, or by means of cross- 
correspondences elsewhere. 

For a long time we waited in vain. There is, 
indeed, reason to think that some attempts were 
made to produce a cross-correspondence in the script 
of one of our automatists, whom we call Mrs. King 
— especially by means of references to the story of 
Acis and Galatea. 1 Otherwise the whole subject 
seemed to be unaccountably dropped ; and it was not 
until nearly a year and a half later, in August, 191 5, 
that a return to it was made. The " sitter " on this 
occasion was Mrs Verrall, who, it must be remem- 
1 See Appendix to this Paper. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 37 

bered, had not been allowed to see either of the 
scripts from which Extracts B and C have been 
taken. 

The relevant passages in this new script are 
contained in Extract D. 

D. 

(Extract from Script of Aug. 2, 1915.) 
(Present: Mrs. Verrall.) 

Someone speaks a tall broad figure with a 
dark beard & eyes that emit light with him stands 
the man who said I am Henry Butcher's ghost 
do you remember? 

Ecate 

(Mrs. V. Yes.) 

not the one who holds a Rose in his hand. His 
hand is resting on the shoulder of the younger 
man & it is he who calls. 

The Aural instruction was I think understood 
Aural appertaining to the Ear 

(Mrs. V. Yes.) 

and now he asks HAS the Satire satire been 
identified 

(Mrs. V. I don't know.) 

Surely you have had my messages concerning 
it [it] belongs to the Ear & comes in 

(Mrs. V. I have not had any messages.) 

It has a thread. Did they not tell you of refer- 
ences to a Cave 



38 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

(Mrs. V. No, not in connection with the Ear 
of Dionysius.) 

The mild eyed melancholy Lotus Eaters came. 

That belongs to the passage 1 immediately be- 
fore the one I am now trying to speak of. men 
in a cave herds 

(At this point Mrs. V. repeated, half aloud, 

the last two words.) 

listen don't talk, herds & a great load of fire- 
wood & the eye 



olive wood staff 







Ai 



the man clung to the fleece of a Ram & so 
passed out 
surely that is plain 

(Mrs. V. Yes.) 

well conjoin that with Cythera & the Ear-man 

The Roseman said Aristotle then Poetics The 
incident was chosen as being evidential of iden- 
tity & it arose out of the Ear train of thought. 

There is a Satire 

write Cyclopean Masonry, why do you say 
masonry I said Cyclopean 

Philox He laboured in the stone quarries and 

1 I.e. to the passage in the Odyssey preceding that which 
tells the story of Polyphemus. 

2 " Ai," perhaps an expression of pain, representing the 
Greek alal. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 39 

drew upon the earlier writer for material for his 
Satire Jealousy 

The story is quite clear to me & I think it 
should be identified 

a musical instrument comes in something like 
a mandoline 



t, 



thrumming thrumming that is the sense of the 
word 1 

He wrote in those stone quarries belonging to 
the Tyrant 

Is any of this clear? 

(Mrs. V. Yes, a great deal, and when I know 
some things I have not been told, probably all.) 

[Drawing of an Ear.] 

You have to put Homer with another 2 & the 

1 What word is here meant? It would seem to be a word 
— perhaps a Greek word — which the communicator has been 
unable to get the automatist to write. I suspect an allusion 
to a passage in the Plutus of Aristophanes (1. 200), which 
parodies the Cyclops of Philoxenus, and perhaps actually 
quotes from the poem. In this passage the made-up word 
QpeTTave?i6 (threttanelo) is used to imitate the sound of 
the cithara. The mysterious figure, or letter, which pre- 
cedes " thrumming " in the script, may be the beginning 
of an attempt to write this word. 

2 " You have to put Homer with another." Who is this 
" other " ? Perhaps Philoxenus himself is meant, though 
this interpretation does not consist very well with the state- 
ment which immediately follows, that what resulted was 
" the pen dipped in vitriol." The more natural meaning 
would seem to be that the "other" who is to be put with 
Homer is a second writer from whom Philoxenus had bor- 
rowed in constructing the plot of his Cyclops. Can the in- 



40 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Ear theme is in it too The pen dipped in vitriol 
that is what resulted &SH 1 knows the passage 
in Aristotle which also comes in There's a fine 
tangle for your unravelling & he of the impa- 
tience 2 will 
Let her wait try again Edmund 
Sicily 

He says when you have identified the classical 
allusions he would like to be told. 
(Mrs. V. Yes.) 
In this Extract, again, there is little with which 
we are not already familiar. But that little contains 
the key to the puzzle. 

" Cythera " ; " Cyclopean, Philox, He laboured 
in the stone-quarries and drew upon the earlier 

tention have been to refer to the unknown Greek original 
from which Ovid derived the story of Acis and Galatea? 
Ovid is our earliest extant authority for this story; but 
there can be little doubt that he took it from a Greek liter- 
ary source, though we do not know what that source was. 
" The earlier writer " from whom, according to the script, 
Philoxenus drew the materials of his satire, might on this 
supposition be, not Homer, but the Greek predecessor from 
whom Ovid borrowed. 

I by no means dismiss this conjecture, which has come 
to me from a scholar of repute. It is a pity, indeed, that 
the evidence for it is not stronger. An allusion to the original 
source of the tale of Acis and Galatea, like the allusion sug- 
gested in a previous note to a passage from the Plutus of 
Aristophanes, would come naturally enough from Verrall, but 
could never have proceeded from the unaided resources of 
Mrs. Willett. 

1 Professor Butcher was familiarly known among his old 
friends by the two first initials of his name. 

2 See footnote on p. 52. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 41 

writer for material for his Satire, Jealousy " — in 
these words I will not say that he who runs may 
read the riddle, but he will certainly have a fair ink- 
ling of it if he first takes the trouble to read up the 
account given of a certain Philoxenus of Cythera 
in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biog- 
raphy and Mythology or in the Encyclopaedia Bri- 
tannica. 

Those of us who are not specialists in classical 
literature need not blush to confess ignorance of the 
very name of Philoxenus. He was nevertheless a 
poet of considerable repute in antiquity though only 
a few lines from his works have actually come down 
to us. 

Philoxenus was a writer of dithyrambs, a species 
of irregular lyric poetry which combined music 
with verse, the musical instrument most generally 
employed being the Kithara or Zither, a kind of 
lyre. He was a native of Cythera, and at the height 
of his reputation spent some time in Sicily at the 
Court of Dionysius the Tyrant of Syracuse. He 
ultimately quarrelled with his patron and was sent 
to prison in one of the stone-quarries. 

So far the accounts that have come down to us 
agree; but they differ as to the cause of the quarrel. 
Most writers, according to the Dictionary of Greek 
and Roman Biography and Mythology, ascribe the 



42 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

oppressive action of Dionysius " to the wounded 
vanity of the tyrant, whose poems Philoxenus not 
only refused to praise, but, on being asked to revise 
one of them, said the best way of correcting it would 
be to draw a black line through the whole paper.' ' 
This version of the quarrel is also followed by the 
writer in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and by Grote 
in his History of Greece. x There was, however, 
another account, mentioned in the Dictionary of 
Biography and Mythology only to be rejected, 
which ascribed the disgrace of the poet " to too close 
an intimacy with the tyrant's mistress Galateia." 

I now come to the heart of the mystery which has 
hitherto baffled us. The most famous of the dithy- 
rambic poems of Philoxenus was a piece entitled 
Cyclops or Galatea. Of this poem only two or three 
lines have been preserved; and any attempt to re- 
construct its plot must depend on other sources of 
information. The Encyclopcedia Britannica says 
of it : " His masterpiece was the Cyclops, a pastoral 
burlesque on the love of the Cyclops for the fair 
Galatea, written to avenge himself upon Dionysius, 
who was wholly or partially blind of one eye." This 
falls in well with the references in the scripts to 
Satire; but does not provide much of a foundation 
for the references to the stories of Ulysses and Poly- 

iVol. X. 303. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 43 

phemus and of Acis and Galatea, and to the topic of 
jealousy. The Dictionary of Biography and My- 
thology helps even less. Moreover, it states that 
the poem was composed in the poet's native island; 
whereas the script affirms that it was written in the 
stone-quarries. 

I have searched through various other English 
authorities and books of reference as well as a few 
foreign ones, in order to discover, if possible, 
whether there was any single modern source from 
which the story told or implied in the scripts could 
be supposed to be derived. Apart from works in 
German or Latin — languages which Mrs. Willett 
does not understand — there are only two books, so 
far as I have been able to discover, which can fairly 
be said to fulfill this condition. One of these is 
Lempriere's Classical Dictionary. Lempriere's ac- 
count is as follows : " A dithyrambic poet of Cyth- 
era, who enjoyed the favour of Dionysius tyrant of 
Syracuse for some time, till he offended him by se- 
ducing one of his female singers. During his con- 
finement Philoxenus composed an allegorical poem, 
called Cyclops, in which he had delineated the char- 
acter of the tyrant under the name of Polyphemus, 
and represented his mistress under the name of 
Galatea, and himself under that of Ulysses." The 
other is a work on the Greek Melic Poets by Dr. 



44 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Herbert Weir Smyth, Professor of Greek at Bryn 
Mawr College, Pennsylvania, obviously intended for 
scholars, and not in the least likely to attract atten- 
tion from the general public. The copy I have seen 
was a presentation copy sent by the publishers to 
the late Dr. Verrall, who thought well of the book 
and used it (so Mrs. Verrall told me) as a text- 
book in connection with some of his lectures. 

" Like Simonides," writes Professor Smyth, 
" Philoxenus was a man of the world, a friend of 
princes, and many stories are told of his nimble wit 
at the Syracusan Court. His friendship with 
Dionysius the Elder was finally broken either by his 
frank criticism of the tragedies of the tyrant or in 
consequence of his passion for Galateia, a beautiful 
flute-player, who was the mistress of Dionysius. 
Released from prison by the prince to pass judgment 
on his verse, the poet exclaimed : an ay a jie eh 
Xarojulag [take me back to the quarries]. In his 
confinement he revenged himself by composing his 
famous dithyramb entitled either Kyklops or 
Galateia, in which the poet represented himself as 
Odysseus, who, to take vengeance on Polyphemus 
(Dionysius), estranged the affections of the nymph 
Galateia, of whom the Kyklops was enamoured." 

Here evidently is the literary unity of which we 
were in search and which was to collect the scattered 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 45 

parts of the puzzle devised by the two friends on the 
other side into a single whole. It is to be found in 
the version just given of the plot of the Cyclops of 
Philoxenus. Dionysius and his " Ear," the stone- 
quarries of Syracuse, Ulysses and Polyphemus, Acis 
and Galatea, Jealousy, and Satire — all these topics 
fall naturally and easily into place in relation to this 
account of the poem. 1 Music and the thrumming 
of a musical instrument can be fitted in without 
much difficulty, as belonging to the characteristics 
of dithyrambic poetry. It only remains to trace the 
passage in Aristotle which " comes in " and which 
" S. H. knows." 

There are two passages occurring within a page 
of each other in the first and second chapters of 
Aristotle's Poetics, either of which might be the 
passage referred to. One of these is general, and 
classes the dithyramb with those kinds of poetry 
which depend for their effects not only upon rhythm 
and metre, but also upon melody. The other distin- 
guishes between the poetry which aims at represent- 
ing men as worse, and that which aims at repre- 
senting them as better, than they really are; and 
mentions the Cyclops of Philoxenus as a specimen of 

1 The ancient authority followed by both Lempriere and 
Prof. Smyth is Athenasus, a late Greek writer, whose work 
may well have been known to Butcher or Verrall, but could 
not possibly be known to Mrs. Willett. 



46 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

the former — that is to say, as a Satirical poem. 
This second passage is referred to by Professor 
Smyth in the paragraph following the one I have 
already quoted. 1 The same paragraph lays stress 
upon the essentially musical character of the dithy- 
ramb, and upon the fame of Philoxenus as musical 
composer no less than as poet. It quotes the comic 
poet Antiphanes, who spoke of him as " a god among 
men, cunning in the true art of music " — oiSgd? rrjv 

Extract D closes with a request from Gurney that 
he should be told as soon as the classical allusions 
had been identified. This request was complied with 
about a fortnight later, as will be seen from Extract 
E, the last with which I shall have to trouble you. 

E. 

{Extract from Script of Aug. 19, 1915.) 

(Present: G. W. B.) 

(G. W. B. First of all, Gurney, I want to tell 
you that all the classical allusions recently given 
to Mrs. Verrall are now completely understood.) 

1 Professor Smyth's words are : " Aristotle says that Phil- 
oxenus was realistic in distinction to the idealistic Timo- 
theos." This interpretation gives a somewhat different shade 
of meaning to Aristotle's language from that which I have 
adopted above. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 47 

Good — at last! 

(G. W. B. We think the whole combination 
extremely ingenious and successful.) 
& A W ish— 

(G. W. B. What is the word after " A. W."?) 
A W-ish 

(G. W. B. Yes.) 
Also S H-ish 
(G. W. B. Yes.) 

The communicator hints that a little more ex- 
pedition might have been shown in solving the prob- 
lem set to us. He apparently forgets that in March, 
1914, he himself informed us that there was much 
more to be got through, and that we had waited for 
a year and a half before any additional light was 
forthcoming. The surprise shown in Extract D 
that no message concerning a Satire and the Ear of 
Dionysius and the Cave of the Cyclops had been 
handed on to Mrs. Verrall shows an even more 
marked forgetfulness; for we had been expressly 
warned to tell her nothing. Such forgetfulness is 
very rare in our experience. I doubt whether a 
parallel instance could be found in the scripts of any 
of our group of automatists. I have no explanation 
to offer of it. 

For the rest, the extract I have just read is chiefly 
interesting for its insistence upon the claim that the 
wmole scheme is characteristic of the two friends 



48 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

who have devised it, and therefore points to the 
survival of their distinctive personalities. 

That the case described in this Paper is an ex- 
tremely remarkable one, few, I think, will be dis- 
posed to deny. Mrs. Willett is in no sense a 
" learned " lady. She has a taste for poetry, and a 
good knowledge of certain English poets; but with 
classical subjects she is as little familiar as the 
average of educated women. This I can affirm with 
confidence, and I have had good opportunity of 
judging. 

In order to test her knowledge of the particular 
topics referred to in this series of scripts I pre- 
pared six questions, writing them out on separate 
pieces of paper, and asked her to answer them then 
and there as each question was handed to her. This 
was on the 27th of May last when I was setting to 
work on the present paper. Questions and answers 
were as follows. (You will of course bear in mind 
that all the scripts, except that from which Extract 
A is taken, were obtained when the automatist was 
in trance, and that no memory of what she writes 
or speaks in trance is carried on into her waking 
consciousness.) 

Qn. 1. Please say what you know about the Ear 
of Dionysius? 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 49 

Ans. I have heard this expression, but do not 
know what is the meaning of it. 

Qu. 2. (a) Did you know that Aristotle had 
written a Treatise on Poetry? 

Ans. No. 

(b) Were you aware that S. H. Butcher 
had written a book on the subject of this Treatise? 

Ans. No. 

Qu. 3. Does the name Cythera convey any 
meaning to you? 

Ans. Yes, it conveys to me the Greek name of 
one of the winds — I believe mentioned in In 
Memoriam. 

Qu. 4. Do you know anything about the story 
of Adis and Galatea? 

Ans. Of Acis I know nothing; of Galatea 1 
know the story of the statue that comes to life. 

Qu. 5. Does the name Polyphemus convey any 
idea to you? 

Ans. I seem to have heard the name, but it has 
no associations for me. 

Qu. 6. Does the name Philoxenus convey any 
idea to you? 

Ans. None whatever. 

Having obtained these answers I decided to show 
Mrs. Willett the extracts which I have read to you 
to-day, and explain to her the scheme and its 



50 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

denouement. This involved a departure from our 
usual practice of withholding from the automatist 
any written or spoken utterances produced by her in 
a state of trance. No harm, however, was likely to 
result in the present case, seeing that the experiment 
had evidently reached its conclusion and that no fur- 
ther amplifications from " the other side " were to 
be looked for. My object was to ascertain whether 
perusal of the extracts would awaken any memories 
that had remained dormant when the automatist was 
answering the questions put to her a few hours be- 
fore. As a matter of fact, nothing of the kind oc- 
curred. The nearest approach to a revival of mem- 
ory was upon my mentioning Handel's Acis and 
Galatea. She then said that Handel and Acis and 
Galatea seemed to go together in her mind ; but she 
was certain she had never either heard the music 
or read the story. On the other hand, her ignorance 
of matters referred to in the extracts went even 
beyond what her answers to the questions indicated ; 
for instance, she could not recall ever having heard 
of the Expedition of the Athenians against Syracuse. 
Her surprise and almost excitement were quite in- 
teresting to watch as the elements of the literary 
puzzle were gradually made clear and finally brought 
to a unity in the Satire of Philoxenus. It was 
abundantly evident that both the elements them- 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 51 

selves and the final solution were entirely outside 
any conscious knowledge she possessed. 

In March, 1914, I read a Paper to the Society 
giving an account of an earlier case derived from 
Willett Scripts in which the principal agent pur- 
ported to be Dr. Verrall. This Paper was subse- 
quently published in Volume XXVII. of the 
Proceedings under the title " Some recent scripts 
affording evidence of personal survival." The facts 
of the case, which I shall refer to as " the Statius 
Case," were briefly these: A passage was to be 
searched for which described a traveller looking 
across a river and wishing himself on the other side, 
but hesitating to battle with the current. If it were 
possible to identify the passage, " the matter," so 
we were told, " would prove interesting." No pas- 
sage satisfactorily answering the required conditions 
could be found by those who were studying the 
Willett Scripts, and the subject was almost for- 
gotten until the scripts suddenly returned to it more 
than a year later. Two new lights were then thrown 
upon the problem. In the first place, Dr. Verrall 
was unmistakably designated as the propounder of 
it; in the second place, a sign-post was provided by 
the statement " Dante makes it clear." Guided by 
these indications we ultimately traced the required 
passage to an Essay by Dr. Verrall entitled " Dante 



52 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

on the Baptism of Statius," which it was practically 
certain that Mrs. Willett had never seen. Thus the 
promise, that if the passage could be identified the 
matter would prove interesting, was amply fulfilled, 
and a valuable addition made to the evidences 
hitherto furnished by automatic writings in favour 
of personal survival. 1 

1 It is only fair to say that criticisms of my Paper on 
the Statius Case have appeared in the Proceedings (Vol. 
XXVII., pp. 458-574), attacking my interpretation of the 
scripts on the double ground that I had shown no sufficient 
reason for connecting Dr. Verrall with the case at all, nor 
for selecting the River of Baptism which Statius hesitated 
to cross as the particular river referred to, when the River 
of Death in the Pilgrim's Progress, or the Rubicon, or any 
other river on the brink of which anyone had ever paused 
might have served the purpose equally well. 

As regards the connection of Dr. Verrall with the case, 
this was to my mind clearly given by the reference to the 
communicator who " Swears he will not here exercise any 
patience whatever, not even about Lavender and Lub," and 
by the plain allusions (as it seemed to me) to Dr. Verrall's 
recently delivered Lectures on Dryden. That the scripts 
meant to indicate Dr. Verrall as the communicator it did 
not occur to me that anyone would question, else I would 
have laboured the point more. Of course it does not fol- 
low that he actually was the communicator; and though I 
fancy my critics have confused the one thing with the other, 
I am sure no such confusion can be found in my Paper. 

As if to remove any possible uncertainty as to who was 
meant, the phrase " He of the little patience," which had 
already been employed to describe the communicator in the 
earlier scripts, is again repeated in the Dionysius Case (see 
Extract D "he of the impatience"), and this time beyond 
all cavil as a synonym for Dr. Verrall. 

The identification of the passage describing the timid 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 53 

Between the Statius Case and that described in the 
present Paper, which I may call the Dionysius 
Case, there is obviously a strong family likeness. 
The method employed, the object proposed, and the 
chief professed agent are the same in both. 

The method is to propound a literary problem 
the construction and solution of which are outside 
the range of the automatisms normal knowledge. 
The solution is at first kept purposely obscure and 
it is left to the industry of the interpreters of the 
script to discover it. When they have failed to 
do so after ample time given additional indications 
are doled out in successive scripts until at last the 
riddle is read. 

The chief ostensible agent in each case is Dr. 

traveller is, I admit, more conjectural. I have, however, 
little or no doubt that it is right. It explains (1) the special 
interest attached to the discovery of the passage; (2) the 
statement that "Dante makes it clear"; and (3) the para- 
phrase of the lines in the Purgatorio which Dante puts into 
the mouth of Statius and which Dr. Verrall's Essay quotes. 
The rivers suggested by my critics do none of these things. 
It also gives a point and significance to the whole incident, 
which would otherwise be wanting, by making it into a prob- 
lem with a solution. Additional corroboration is, I think, 
furnished by the circumstance that another problem with 
a solution, similar though much more complicated, follows 
so soon afterwards. The Dionysius Case throws light on the 
Statius Case that preceded it. In this connection it may 
be of interest to note that the scripts had already begun on 
the former before my Paper on the latter had been pub- 
lished, and therefore before anything had been done which 
could put Mrs. Willett on the track of our interpretation. 



54 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Verrall, though in the Dionysius case he is associated 
with S. H. Butcher. 

The object in each case is to furnish ground for 
believing that the ostensible agent or agents are also 
the real ones continuing to exist as individuals after 
bodily death. 

How far has this object been achieved in the case 
now before us? 

There are two ways in which this question may 
be approached. The hypothesis that the ostensible 
are also the actual communicators is one of several 
possible alternative explanations. If we can test 
these alternatives in relation to the facts of the case, 
and find ourselves compelled to reject all but one, 
that one must be regarded as holding the field. This 
negative method of procedure is to my mind likely 
to prove the most fruitful; but we shall also have 
to consider how far the facts afford positive grounds 
for accepting the identity claimed in the scripts. 

In my Paper on the Statius Case I analysed with 
some care the various alternative explanations which 
appear, I will not say probable, but at all events pos- 
sible. What I have said there applies mutatis mut- 
andis here also; and therefore I may be the more 
brief on the present occasion. 

In all such cases four main questions have to be 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 55 

asked. The first two relate to the knowledge ex- 
hibited in the scripts : 

(1). Did this knowledge reach the automatist 
normally ? 

(2). If not normally, is there anybody living 
from whose mind it can be plausibly supposed to 
have been supplied ? 

The third and fourth questions relate to the use 
made of the knowledge, however acquired — in other 
words, to the design exhibited in the scripts. Design 
implies a planning or constructing intelligence. Ac- 
cordingly : 

(3). Can the planning intelligence responsible for 
the design — in the Dionysius Case the extremely 
elaborate design — which the scripts reveal be plaus- 
ibly supposed to have been that of the automatist 
herself whether conscious or subconscious? 

(4) . Can it plausibly be supposed to have been the 
mind of some living person actively impressing its 
thoughts upon the mind of the automatist? 

In the Dionysius Case, if we are willing to follow 
where the evidence actually before us leads, instead 
of attaching ourselves immoveably to preconceived 
ideas of what is possible or impossible, our answer 
to all these questions must I think, be in the nega- 
tive. 

(1). The evidence goes to show that knowledge 



56 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

concerning Philoxenus of Cythera, his relations with 
Dionysius, and his poem Cyclops or Galatea, was not 
normally acquired by the automatist. 

On this point we have first of all her own declara- 
tion of complete ignorance. Mrs. Willett is a lady 
of good social position, personally well known to 
all the members of the investigating group, every 
one of whom has the most absolute confidence 
in her integrity and bona fides. She is herself 
keenly alive to the importance of noting and record- 
ing anything that can help to throw light upon the 
contents of her scripts and the possible sources 
which may have been drawn upon in their produc- 
tion. In this respect she has, on many occasions, 
been of material assistance to the investigators. 
When Mrs. Willett says she is totally ignorant of a 
particular topic, no one who knows her as we do 
would for a moment question her word. 

No doubt it is possible for knowledge once pos- 
sessed to be forgotten and yet to persist as a dor- 
mant memory in the subconscious mind. But this 
possibility must not be pressed too far. It is press- 
ing it very far indeed to suppose that at some time 
or other Mrs. Willett either read or heard the story 
of Philoxenus that she then forgot it completely so 
far as her normal consciousness was concerned, but 
was nevertheless able subconsciously to retain and 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 57 

use it in the concoction of an elaborate puzzle such 
as we are now considering. 

Nor is this all. It is not merely of Philoxenus 
and his poem that Mrs. Willett declares herself ig- 
norant, but also of other main elements in the puz- 
zle, the story of Ulysses and Polyphemus for in- 
stance, and that of Acis and Galatea, to say nothing 
of the " passage from Aristotle." The intelligence 
that constructed the puzzle was certainly aware of 
the details of these stories, and also knew that the 
adventure of the Cyclops' Cave immediately follows 
the tale of the Lotus Eaters in the Homeric narra- 
tive. It is not easy to believe that the various 
threads so cunningly woven together all belong to 
the category of latent memories which the subcon- 
scious self can utilize for its own purposes while 
the normal self remans blissfully unconscious of 
them. 

Again : Let us suppose for argument's sake that 
the knowledge of the story of Philoxenus exhibited 
in the scripts was normally acquired. From what 
source was it in that case derived ? It might be con- 
jectured that Mrs. Willett, having in one way or 
another had her attention called to the name of 
Philoxenus, proceeded to study a variety of authori- 
ties, and from their different accounts pieced to- 
gether the story as it appears in the scripts. I am 



58 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

not suggesting that such a conjecture has any plausi- 
bility. Mrs. Willett's knowledge of things classical 
is small, and her interest in them but slight. That 
she should have undertaken the labour involved in 
this research is very unlikely. But that, having 
undertaking it, the whole subject should then pass 
out of her conscious memory is, to me at least, in- 
credible. 

The alternative (and less improbable) conjecture 
is that she took the story bodily either from Lem- 
priere's Classical Dictionary or from Professor 
Smyth's Greek Melic Poets, and then forgot that 
she had ever known it. x 

As regards the Greek Melic Poets, I think it on 
general grounds very unlikely that she ever had the 
volume in her hands, much more than she read any 
page of it with care. The book itself is, as I have 
already indicated, of an extremely technical charac- 



1 On this point Mrs. Willett writes to me as follows : 
"Lempriere's Classical Dictionary is quite unknown to me. 
I am as certain as I am of anything that I never saw or 
heard of Prof. Smyth's book. I have never taken a single 
volume from the shelves of Dr. Verrall's study. To the 
best of my belief, I have never been in that room alone. 
During Dr. Verrall's life it was not entered by visitors stay- 
ing in the house unless they were taken to see him. After 
his death I stayed, I believe, only once with Mrs. Verrall, 
and I have sat in the room with her, but I believe I never 
was in the room alone at any time." This confirms a similar 
statement made to me verbally by Mrs. Verrall herself. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 59 

ter. Merely to open it at random would repel any- 
body but an expert. One would certainly be sur- 
prised to come across it anywhere outside a scholar's 
library. It is true that Mrs. Willett has once or 
twice stayed for a short visit with Mrs. Verrall at 
Cambridge, and may conceivably havie seen the 
book on one of these occasions. But as its place 
was on one of the many shelves in Dr. Verrall's 
study, a room rarely entered by visitors unless they 
were taken there specially, the chances of such a 
thing having happened seem to me very remote. 
Lempriere's Classical Dictonary is no doubt a more 
accessible work. On the other hand, it is decidedly 
more difficult to suppose it the sole or main source 
of the puzzle as a whole. Even Professor Smyth's 
account of Philoxenus by no means covers all the 
elements employed in the puzzle. It does no more 
than allude to the story of Ulysses and Polyphemus, 
it refers to the stone-quarries only by their Greek 
name which Mrs. Willett would not have under- 
stood, and it makes no mention whatever of Acis 
and Galatea. Lempriere's Dictionary not only 
makes no mention of Acis and Galatea, but is silent 
also upon the very important topics of Aristotle and 
and of music. The old difficulty is thus still with 
us. All the topics associated in the scripts must be 
assumed, on the supposition that the knowledge 



6o THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

shown therein was normally acquired, to have been 
at one time or another consciously known to the 
automatist. There is no single source from which 
they could all be derived. Of nearly every one of 
them she now professes total ignorance. Can she 
have really forgotten them so completely that no 
memory of them is recalled even when the scripts 
are shown to her and the whole scheme explained? 
To my mind this is most difficult to believe. But, 
if we insist upon regarding the knowledge shown 
in the scripts to have been normally acquired, then 
we must either believe this or believe that Mrs. 
Willett's statements are deliberately false. Delib- 
erately false I am sure they are not. 

(2). There is no living person from whose mind 
the more essential materials utilized in the construc- 
tion of the puzzle can plausibly be supposed to have 
been supplied. The members of the group who were 
engaged in studying the Willett scripts were six in 
number, namely Sir Oliver Lodge, Mr. Piddington, 
Mrs. Sidgwick, Miss Johnson, Mrs. Verrall and my- 
self. No one outside the group had seen the scripts. 
Mrs. Verrall herself had not seen the scripts from 
which Extracts B and C are taken until after the 
script containing Extract D had been written. None 
of us — and in this statement I expressly include 
Mrs. Verrall — knew anything about Philoxenus or 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 61 

his poem until the mention of " Philox " in the 
script of Aug. 2, 191 5, led Mrs. Verrall to look up 
the name in the Dictionary of Biography and My- 
thology. The automatists who were collaborating 
with us were equally ignorant. The number even 
of professed classical scholars able to supply the re- 
quired knowledge without consulting books of ref- 
erence is, I venture to think, an extremely limited 
one. 

Perhaps it will be urged that, limited as the num- 
ber may be, there are assuredly some few individuals 
in possession of the necessary information. May it 
not have passed telepathically from one or more of 
these to the automatist? 

This supposition appears to me to be one of those 
which it is impossible to disprove, but which have 
practically nothing to support them. 

How are we to conceive of the process taking 
place? Are we to imagine Mrs. Willett's mind, 
conscious or subconscious, reaching out at large to 
an unknown x (or to unknown x, y, and 2), and 
gathering in knowledge of the various subjects out 
of which the puzzle is woven? That seems a some- 
what fantastic notion; and moreover it implies at 
least a nucleus of knowledge if not some general 
conception of the puzzle itself, round which the rest 
of the otherwise miscellaneous information could 



62 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

crystallize. Not less fantastic is the suggestion that 
an unknown x has been engaged in impressing his 
own thoughts upon Mrs. Willett's mind after the 
fashion of a hypnotiser trying to act upon his patient 
from a distance. If such an x exists let enquiry be 
made and let him be produced. Or finally, has there 
been no activity on either side, but only an automa- 
tic infiltration from mind to mind, unaccompanied 
by any consciousness on either side that such a pro- 
cess was taking place? This last supposition is, I 
think, even less plausible than the others, as it 
entirely fails to account for the fact that the ideas 
which have thus been unconsciously communicated 
are not haphazard ideas, but such as have evidently 
been selected in order to serve a purpose. There 
must be conscious agency somewhere, else this selec- 
tion remains unexplained. 

There is no warrant, so far as I am aware, in any 
facts hitherto observed in connection with the pheno- 
mena of telepathy for believing that particular and 
detailed knowledge of the kind involved in this case 
is ever telepathically transmitted or received where 
no link already exists between the minds concerned 
in the process. 

(3) and (4). I believe the instinctive judgment 
of trained scholars will be that the Dionysius puzzle 
could not have been invented, and elaborated with- 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 63 

out slip or blunder, except by somebody who was 
himself a scholar, and a ripe and good one. Mrs. 
Willett herself cannot reasonably be credited with 
its authorship. This point is raised in question (3), 
but need not be further insisted on her. For the 
answers to questions (1) and (2) being in the 
negative, the answers to question (3) and (4) must 
be in the negative also. As regards question (3), 
this conclusion can only be escaped by supposing 
the mind of the automatist to have constructed the 
puzzle out of materials super-normally derived from 
some non-living source — a supposition which not 
only has little to 'recommend it in itself, but also 
practically gives away the case against communica- 
tion from the dead. And as regards question (4), 
if there was no living person from whom the ma- 
terials could plausibly be supposed to have been de- 
rived, still less could there be any living person re- 
sponsible for the weaving of these materials into 
a design. 

If these conclusions be accepted, the only alter- 
native left would seem to be that the communica- 
tions have their source in some intelligence or in- 
telligences not in the body. It does not even then 
follow that they proceed from the disembodied 
spirits of the individuals whom we knew in life as 
A. W. Verrall and S. H. Butcher. Those, however, 



64 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

who have got so far as to ascribe them to in- 
telligences not in the body are not likely to find any 
additional difficulty in the personal identity claimed 
for the communicators. To do so would be to 
strain at a gnat after swallowing a camel. 

Independently of the negative grounds we have 
just been considering, are there any positive ones 
that may fairly be urged for accepting Verrall and 
Butcher as the real authors of this curious literary 
puzzle? I think there are, though it is not easy to 
estimate their exact value. 

The reminder to Mrs. Verrall of the surprise ex- 
pressed by her husband at her not knowing what 
was meant by the Ear of Dionysius, would be a 
very striking incident if it were certain that I had 
not mentioned it to Mrs. Willett. As I said before, 
I do not believe I did mention it. But I cannot 
be absolutely sure, and the doubt precludes me 
from laying stress upon it as evidence of 
identity. 

Extract E claims for the scheme as a whole that 
it is " A. W. ish " and " S. H. ish." I think this 
is true. The ingenuity of the combination, the un- 
expectedness of the solution, and the out-of-the-way 
knowledge utilized in it are eminently Verrallian. 
In constructing the puzzle Verrall appears to be the 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 65 

leading spirit. Butcher helps with his contribution 
from the Poetics of Aristotle. But he ia content 
in such a matter to play the second part; and this 
too is not uncharacteristic. 

The personal traits and mannerisms which im- 
pressed Mr. Bayfield so strongly in the Statius 
Scripts, and which he dealt with so happily in his 
Note appended to my former Paper, are perhaps 
not quite so marked in the present case. But I 
think old friends of Verrall's will agree with me 
that they are not wholly absent, however difficult it 
may be to enable others to realize them. 1 

Finally — and this I think is a point of some im- 
portance — we have the remarkable circumstance that 
the only account of the contents of the Cyclops of 
Philoxenus which at all closely resembles that fol- 
lowed in the scripts, and at the same time includes 
references to Aristotle and the art of music 
(mousike), is to be found, so far as my researches 
extend, in a book which we know Verrall to have 
been familiar with and to have used as a text-book 
for lectures. If this is a chance coincidence it is 
at least a curious one. It may well be that the com- 
municator had this very circumstance in mind when 

1 Note, for instance, the characteristic Verrallian impa- 
tience, eagerness, and emphasis in such phrases as " not 
Stag, do go on" in Extract C, and "HAS the Satire been 
identified?" and "listen, don't talk" in Extract D. 



66 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

he made the statement (to be found in Extract D), 
" The incident was chosen as being evidential of 
identity, and it arose out of the Ear train of 
thought. ,, 



APPENDIX 

Containing extracts from the Scripts of Mrs. King 
referred to at p. 36 of the foregoing Paper. 

In Mrs. Willett's Script of March 2, 1914 (Vide 
Extract C, above), instruction was given that until 
the " effort " was completed the portions of it as 
they came were not to be shewn to any other auto- 
matist. This was almost equivalent to saying that 
a cross-correspondence with the script of some other 
automatist belonging to the group was about to be 
attempted. I believe some attempt of the kind was 
made in certain passages from scripts produced by 
" Mrs. King." I have not included these in the text 
of my Paper on the Ear of Dionysius, partly be- 
cause I was unwilling to break the narrative, partly 
because the cross-correspondences themselves are not 
so clear and unmistakable as to carry unquestioning 
conviction. That Mrs. King's scripts taken as a 
whole exhibit manifold connections with those of 
certain other automatists, of whom Mrs. Willett is 
one, I have no doubt at all. But what may well be 

67 



68 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

in their origin genuine " messages " seem in her case 
peculiarly liable to get blurred and sophisticated in 
transmission, and therefore difficult to interpret. My 
readers must judge for themselves how far the inter- 
pretations which I tentatively put forward of the 
passages here collected are justified. In support of 
the view that a cross-correspondence is being at- 
tempted, it should be noticed that the first three pas- 
sages all belong to March, 1914; that is to say, that 
they were all produced within a few weeks of the 
Willett scripts from which Extracts B and C in the 
Paper are taken. The dates of the Willett scripts 
are Feb. 28 and March 2. The first passage I 
quote from Mrs. King was written on the intervening 
day, March 1. 

(a) (Extract from King Script of March 1, 
1914.) 

Floating on the waters. People in glass houses 
should not throw stones. Very good. Go on like 
this and it will be famous. The flames are fanned. 
The green leaves in the merry ring time. . . . 

Protoplasm and poly — Something like poly- 
phera, cannot quite get it. 

Note here the following ideas : 

(1) Waters, (2) throwing stones, (3) fanning 
of flames (cf. Acts and Galatea: " Hush ye pretty 
warbling choir, Your thrilling strains awake my 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 69 

pains And kindle fierce desire; " and again, " No 
grace no charm is wanting To set the heart on fire; " 
and again, " I rage — I melt — I burn — The feeble 
god has stabbed me to the heart "), (4) Life in the 
country in spring time (cf. opening chorus in Acis 
and Galatea). 

" Polyphera " may possibly be an attempt at Poly- 
phemus, or Polypheme. 

(b) (Extract from King Script of March 13, 
1914.)! 

The living water — the foam of the torrent. 
Margaret, Margaret. Just a stone's throw. The 
prick in the finger. Love lies bleeding. The 
merry merry ring time, Sweet lovers love the 
spring. The folded hands. Now write this, that 
many words are missing, but the sense is there — 
it is a part 'of something else. 

Here we have, repeated from the former script : 
(1) Water, (2) throwing of a stone, (3) the 
spring and lovers* motif. 

The " waters " of the former script have, how- 
ever, now become more distinctively a stream; and 
the phrase " living water " seems specially appropri- 
ate as applied to the fountain and river into which 
the dead Acis was changed, becoming thereby im- 
mortal. " Margaret, Margaret " ( from Arnold's 
Forsaken Merman) , may be intended to suggest 



70 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

the sea-nymph Galatea; while " Love lies bleeding " 
is an apt description of the fate of Acis. 

Note that a cross-correspondence is claimed in 
the last words of the extract. 

(c) (Extract from King Script of March 24, 
1914.) 

Hark hark the lark at Heaven's gate sings 
And morn begins to rise. 
The happy happy lovers. 

Now comes the storm, the whispered warning 
of their fate. Say this that the stones in the pool 
are round — the doctored sense. 

The first part of "Acis and Galatea ends with a 
duet between the lovers " Happy ! happy ! happy we." 
The second part begins with a chorus of Nymphs 
and Shepherds, pianissimo at first (cf. "whispered 
warning of their fate"), but finishing fortissimo 
(cf. "the storm"). The words are as follows: 

" Wretched lovers ! Fate has past 
This sad decree, — no joy shall last. 
Wretched lovers! quit your dream, 
Behold the monster Polypheme! 
See what ample strides he takes! 
The mountain nods ! the forest shakes ! 
The waves run frightened to the shores ! 
Hark how the thundering giant roars ! " 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 71 

Note again the connection in the Script of stones 
and water. 

For " the doctored sense " see under Extract (d). 

(d) (Extract from King Script of April 1, 
1915O 

Dionysius . . . Arethusa . . . 
Stones in the market place — crying — 
the filtered sense . . . 
The Sicilian Ode. Blest pair of Sirens. 
The meaning is quite clear — Do you understand 
it . . . 

Arethusa occurs in connection with Dionysius' 
Ear in the Willett Script of Feb. 28, 19 14 (Extract 
B in the Paper), where it is apparently used to 
indicate the locality, viz. Syracuse. 

" Stones in the market place — crying — " though 
more naturally reminiscent of Luke xix. 40, may 
possibly be an allusion to the stoning of Stephen. 
Cf . Acts vii. 59 and 60 : " And they stoned Stephen, 
calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus receive 
my spirit! And he kneeled down, and cried with 
a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." 
In the same Willett Script (Feb. 28, 19 14) Acis 
is referred to as " that sort of Stephen man." 



72 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

With " the filtered sense " compare " the doc- 
tored sense" in Extract (c). So far as I am 
aware there is no similar phrase to be found any- 
where in King script. The meaning is obscure; 
but possibly a reference to the acoustic properties 
of the Ear of Dionysius may be intended. In any 
case "the doctored sense" in Extract (c) must be 
taken to refer back to "the filtered sense" in 
Extract (d). 

The words " Sicilian Ode — Blest pair of Sirens " 
suggested to me that " Sicilian " must be a mistake 
for " Cecilian," and that the " Ode " must be 
Dryden's Ode for St. Cecilia's Day. On my asking 
Mrs. King, however, immediately after the script 
was finished, in what sense she had understood 
the adjective, she at once replied " Sicilian, not 
Cecilian, was what I saw — difficult to say whether 
seen or heard first." This is confirmed by her con- 
temporaneous note on Arethusa: " Impression of 
river in Sicily — I have been there." 

It seems to me not unlikely that in " The Sicilian 
Ode " we have an allusion either to the Cyclops or 
Galatea of Philoxenus, or to the Acts and Galatea 
of Handel — perhaps to both. An essential feature 
in both is the combination of music with verse : and 
this is, I think, the point of the reference to Mil- 
ton's " Blest pair of Sirens " which follows : 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 73 

" Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy, 
Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and 

Verse, 
Wed your divine sounds and mixed power 

employ. . . ." 

Aristotle's Poetics, I. 10, has already been re- 
ferred to as probably the passage (or one of the 
passages) in Aristotle "known to S.H." (see 
Willett Script of Aug. 2, 19 15, Extract D in the 
Paper). The following is Butcher's own transla- 
tion : " There are again certain kinds of poetry 
which employ all the means above mentioned — 
namely, rhythm, melody and metre. Such are the 
dithyrambic and nomic poetry, and also Tragedy 
and Comedy; but between them the difference is that 
in the first two cases these means are all employed 
at the same time, in the latter separately." 

(e) (Extract from King Script of October 3, 
1915O 

Handel and the berries. 

I take this to refer to the famous Air in Handel's 
Acis and Galatea: " O ruddier than the cherry, O 
sweeter than the berry! " etc., in which Polyphemus 
declares his love for Galatea. 



74 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Mrs. King told me that she did not know this 

air, nor indeed to the best of her knowledge had 

ever heard of it and that Handel's Acts and 
Galatea conveyed no idea to her mind. 



II. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS : A DISCUSSION 
OF THE EVIDENCE. 



II. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS : A DISCUSSION 
OF THE EVIDENCE. 

A Paper Read to the Society for Psychical 

Research at a Private Meeting on 

April 26, 1917. 

By Miss F. Melian Stawell. 

To my mind the most striking single piece of evi- 
dence pointing towards survival that has appeared 
lately in our records is that furnished by the cluster 
of scripts connected with the " Ear of Dionysius," 
and it is to these that I wish to devote my paper. 
I choose them instead of the evidence in " Ray- 
mond/' partly because they are more within my 
compass, and partly because it seems to me that 
the possibility of chance-coincidence is less great 
here than in " Raymond." The most remarkable 
incident in " Raymond " is that of the photograph, 
unknown to the medium or the sitters, but in which 
the general features of the background and the re- 
lation of two figures — one leaning on the other — 
were correctly described. Can we say confidently 

77 



yS THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

that this coincidence, remarkable as it is, is yet 
beyond the reach of chance? I could not myself, 
though no doubt answers will vary. For it is 
extremely difficult to collect enough evidence about 
chance-coincidence. All I can say is that I have 
been impressed by the amount of chance-coin- 
cidence that has come under my own observation. 
For instance, the experiment of artificial scripts 
made by the S.P.R. in 191 1 showed, I thought, a 
surprising amount of cross-correspondence, entirely 
due to chance. You may remember that six per- 
sons, none of whom possessed any supernormal 
powers, were asked, each on six several occasions, 
to open at random some book of English literature, 
choose a passage, and write down the thoughts 
suggested. In comparing the thirty-six writings, at 
least one distinct cross-correspondence, that on 
" Moonlight," was to be observed. I myself, who 
happened to be one of the experimenters, found to 
my astonishment that the casual script of another 
possessed for me personally the greatest signifi- 
cance. In fact so astonished was I that I thought 
some telepathic agency must be at work. The 
phrases in this script, which to an ordinary reader 
had no obvious connection, could all be interpreted, 
and very easily, as connected with a friend of mine 
who had lately died. " Moonlight " also had a 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 79 

special significance for me in the same connection. 
Miss Johnson then pointed out that to test the mat- 
ter we should ask the writer, another lady, if she 
could remember how the phrases came into her 
mind, and that we should also make experiments 
to see if there was, in fact, the possibility of 
telepathy between us. What was the result? No 
thought-transference took place in our experiments, 
and the writer had a complete and satisfactory 
explanation of how the phrases, so significant to 
me, had come into her own script, carrying for her 
quite other associations than they did for myself. 

Again, I have noticed for the last few years an 
absurd frequency with which either the number 11 
or a multiple of it is associated with some date, 
place, or topic, in which I am interested, so much 
so that it would be easy to make out a case for a 
mysterious connection between myself and the 
number 11. 

I mention this topic of chance, partly to urge the 
need for further investigation and partly because 
of its bearing on the " Ear of Dionysius." It is 
obvious, I think, that all the statements in the 
scripts we have to consider cannot be due to chance, 
though some of them may be. 

Mr. Balfour has stated and analysed the incident 
in a masterly fashion. His argument that the com- 



80 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

municator was really Dr. Verrall's cliscarnate mind 
is certainly extremely cogent. But I do not feel 
it entirely convincing. There is a difficulty, and, 
apart from this, another hypothesis is possible. Of 
course, if there were no general reason to doubt 
survival after death, there would be less reason to 
trouble about another hypothesis. But there is 
plenty of reason for doubt, because of all the nega- 
tive evidence that exists, some of it collected by the 
S.P.R. itself, e.g. the failure of test-questions, or 
the inability, shown on more than one occasion, to 
state the contents of a sealed envelope written be- 
fore the communicator's death. 

The positive evidence, however, furnished by the 
" Ear of Dionysius " seems, as I said, very con- 
siderable, and may be summarised thus, though the 
summary cannot do justice to its intricacy and 
fullness. In two scripts of Mrs. Willett's, herself 
no classical scholar, there appeared a number of 
classical allusions, some of them recondite, and all 
said to be connected with the " Ear of Dionysius " 
(a whispering-gallery constructed by the tyrant 
and opening on the stone-quarries of Syracuse 
which were used as a prison). Further, the allu- 
sions were given in such a way that their connec- 
tion was a regular puzzle, even to trained scholars, 
e.g. the " One Ear " (of Dionysius) was, the script 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 81 

indicated, to be connected with the " One Eye," 
evidently the one eye of the Cyclops Polyphemus. 
But how? At last, in a later sitting, the clue was 
suddenly revealed by the half-word " Philox," indi- 
cating the name of Philoxenus, a Greek poet, 
closely associated with Dionysius, whom he satirised 
as Polyphemus. The story of Philoxenus, accord- 
ing to one version, a somewhat peculiar one, made 
all the allusions and connections perfectly clear. 
The communicator purported to be Dr. Verrall, 
aided by his friend Prof. Butcher, and the style 
in which the references were given strongly resem- 
bled his. Finally, after all the scripts were written, 
it was discovered that the story of Philoxenus 
in the appropriate version happened to be told 
with some detail in a book, Smyth's Greek Melic 
Poets, that Dr. Verrall used and had in his 
library. 

I said there was a difficulty in the hypothesis that 
Dr. Verrall was communicating. It is this. In 
the two leading scripts (Feb. 28, Mar. 2, 19 14, 
Stripts B and C) the communicator said that Mrs. 
Verrall was to hear nothing of the matter, and that 
there was much more to be got through. Yet, 
abruptly, immediately after this, all communica- 
tion on the topic ceased, so far as Mrs. Willett was 
concerned, for a whole year and a half, until sud- 



82 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

denly, at a sitting where Mrs. Verrall herself was 
present, the subject was re-opened, the clue given, 
and great surprise expressed that Mrs. Verrall had 
received no message on the matter. This implies 
a very strange lapse of memory on the part of the 
communicator, so strange that one is forced to ask, 
Can it be explained satisfactorily on the hypothesis 
that there really was a deliberate conscious person- 
ality controlling the communications? I find it 
hard to think so. 

And another hypothesis is at least plausible. We 
may, I think, rule out pretty confidently the sug- 
gestion that Mrs. Willett herself had ever known 
the whole story of Philoxenus and all the refer- 
ences involved. For we are told that she is not a 
classical scholar, and a non-classical reader could 
hardly have acquired the knowledge necessary with- 
out deliberately hunting through classical books for 
the purpose. If Mrs. Willett had done this, she 
could scarcely have forgotten it. But if she did not 
forget it, she must have acted in bad faith. And 
not only is her good faith vouched for by our in- 
vestigators, but no one acting in bad faith would 
have left the communications with the inconsequent 
ending I have described. The messages could so 
easily have been neatly rounded off long before the 
sitting with Mrs. Verrall, and so gained greatly in 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 83 

impressiveness. But it by no means follows that 
Mrs. Willett, acting in perfect good faith, did not 
have a fair amount of relevant knowledge latent 
in her mind which would help to build up the script. 
It is plain that Mrs. Willett's conscious mind does 
forget very easily. When asked by Mr. Balfour 
(May 27, 1916) what she knew about the "Ear 
of Dionysius," she said she had heard the expres- 
sion, but did not know the meaning of it. Yet only 
two years before she had written, in her normal 
consciousness, script containing a fairly full ac- 
count of the " Ear," a script of which she had kept 
an annotated copy to which, as Mr. Balfour tells 
us, she could refer at any time (p. 205). I feel, 
therefore, considerable hesitation in thinking that 
she had really never known that Prof. Butcher had 
written on Aristotle's Poetics. For she was inter- 
ested in Prof. Butcher, and she was a friend of 
Mrs. Verrall. She must have had many opportuni- 
ties of seeing or hearing some reference to his most 
important work. Nor can I feel sure that an 
educated woman " with a taste for poetry " had 
never come across the story of Ulysses and the 
Cyclops Polyphemus; though I can readily believe 
that she had forgotten the name Polyphemus and 
the fact of Prof. Butcher's connection with the 
Poetics, the knowledge remaining dormant even in 



84 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

her sub-conscious mind until stimulated by some 
outside influence. 

That influence, I suggest, was the sub-conscious 
mind of Mrs. Verrall. It does seem to me that Mr. 
Balfour dismisses this possibility far too lightly. In 
the first place, I think it not only possible, but 
probable, that Mrs. Verrall had at the bottom of 
her mind all the classical references required. It is 
true she thought she knew nothing about Philoxenus 
and never had known. But so did I, when I 
heard Mr. Balfour's paper, and yet I must have 
known something, and very likely all, that was 
needed. I have read the Poetics, the Politics, and 
Grote's History, and they all refer to Philoxenus. 
I think it highly probable that I had read the article 
in Lempriere's Classical Dictionary that gives the 
very version of his quarrel with Dionysius men- 
tioned in the notes to the Greek Melic Poets, and 
followed in the script. I cannot be sure but this 
is my reason. There are a very considerable num- 
ber of allusions to Philoxenus, conjectural or cer- 
tain, scattered up and down Greek literature — how 
many the non-classical reader may judge by con- 
sulting Smith's Dictionary of Classical Biography. 
Three of these occur in Aristophanes' Frogs, 
Clouds, and Plutus {Frogs, 1506; Clouds, 332; 
Plutus, 290). I have read all three plays with 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 85 

some care, and it is the usual practice of a student 
in such cases to look up the names of classical 
authors referred to in the text, or the notes, if 
otherwise unfamiliar. 1 

Now I cannot doubt that Mrs. Verrall had read 
at least as much as I and studied as carefully. 
Further, before the evidential scripts occurred, 
there was a good deal to attract her attention to 
the whole topic of Dionysius and his prisoners, 
Philoxenus included. On Aug. 26, 19 10, before 
Dr. Verrall's death, Mrs. Willett, when sitting for 
script with her, dictated the phrase " Dionysius' 
Ear — the lobe." Mrs. Verrall did not understand 
the phrase and talked it over with her husband, 
who twitted her with her ignorance or forgetful- 
ness. Now, is it not natural to suppose that, after 
this, she looked up the subject or got Dr. Verrall 
to tell her all he could about it? Surely any clas- 
sical student would have done so much. And then, 
either in her own reading or in the course of con- 
versation, she might easily have come upon the 
story of Philoxenus, closely connected as he is with 
Dionysius. 

1 Since writing the above I see that in Rogers' edition of 
the Plutus (published 1904) the relevant version of the 
Philoxenus story is given with considerable detail in the 
notes, ad versum 290. It would be interesting to know if 
Mrs. Verrall had seen this excellent edition. 



86 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Moreover, the whole story, as we have said — 
including one express reference to Aristotle and to 
music, Mousike — a word expressly dictated in Mrs. 
Willett' s script — is compactly given in a page of 
Prof. Smyth's Greek Melic Poets. Dr. Verrall had 
a presentation copy of this work and thought well of 
it. It is certainly not far-fetched to suppose that 
Mrs. Verrall at some time or other had at least 
glanced through the pages. The book is full of in- 
teresting bits of information very useful for a classi- 
cal teacher. 1 If Mrs. Verrall had once read p. 461 
of this handy little volume she would, with the rest 
of her normal classical knowledge, have been, at one 
time or other, in possession of all the facts neces- 
sary to build up the scheme of associated ideas that 
seemed so complicated to an outsider. 

This " odd old human story of long ago," as the 
Willett script calls the tale of Philoxenus, is just 
the kind to catch an imaginative student's imagina- 

1 It contains, by the way, a special reference to the Sicilian 
worship of Artemis and her connection with Arethusa and 
the Alpheus (p. 301). "Sicilian Artemis," it may be remem- 
bered, appears in the Willett script for no apparent reason. 

I have since been told by my friend, Miss Matthaei of 
Newnham College, that Smyth's book is the standard edi- 
tion of the Greek lyric poets now in use at Cambridge, and 
that almost every classical student at Newnham has a copy 
on her shelves, no other edition having such helpful notes. 
Miss Matthaei said she could scarcely imagine that Mrs. 
Verrall had not read the book. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 87 

tion. Indeed it is doubtless just the kind to have 
interested and amused Dr. Verrall himself, but 
then, if so, he would have been likely to mention 
it to other scholars, especially to his wife. It may 
be said in objection that it would be very strange 
for Mrs. Verrall to have known this story and then 
forgotten it so completely. But I cannot agree. I 
forget too much myself. And it is surely at least 
equally strange that the " Ear of Dionysius " 
should have conveyed nothing to her either. That 
is much better known, and must, I should think, 
often have been matter of her conscious knowl- 
edge. 

I can see no real difficulty, therefore, in assuming 
that the knowledge required may have been latent 
in Mrs. Verrall's mind and that her subconscious 
self could weave the associations together, much as 
it might in a fairly coherent dream. 1 On this 
hypothesis I should proceed to explain what hap- 
pened somewhat as follows. Rapport between Mrs. 
Willett and Mrs. Verrall on the subject of the " Ear 
of Dionysius " had already been established before 
Dr. Verrall's death. Afterwards, Jan. 10, 1914, 
there appeared a fairly long piece of Willett script 

1 1 note that this comparison to the modus operandi of 
our minds when dreaming has been made independently by 
Miss May Sinclair in an acute letter printed in the S.P.R. 
Journal (May-June, 1917). 



88 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

(script A) written in normal consciousness and 
sending messages to Mrs. Verrall about the Ear 
of Dionysius, the stone quarries, Sicily, and poetry. 
All the allusions, as Mr. Balfour himself points 
out, " might be supposed ... to have been at 
one time or other within the normal knowledge of 
the automatist." But further, all the allusions are 
of such a kind that they would, if seen by Mrs. 
Verrall — and they were both seen and studied by 
her (Jan. 19, 1914) — stimulate any latent memories 
she might have about Dionysius and Philoxenus. I 
assume that they did in fact so stimulate them, just 
enough to make them active, but subconsciously, 
not consciously. 

Owing to this activity, about five weeks later 
Feb. 28, Mar. 2, 19 14), when Mrs. Willett sits 
for script with Mr. Balfour (Scripts B and C) the 
topics in question leak through in an obscure and 
fragmentary fashion, from Mrs. Verrall's mind into 
Mrs. Willett's. Here they find congenial soil, for 
Mrs. Willett herself had already been thinking 
about the Ear of Dionysius, Sicily, poetry, Dr. 
Verrall, Prof. Butcher, and their joint interest in 
classical literature, (script A, Jan. 10, 19 14, and 
compare her vision of Prof. Butcher and his 
classical message to Verrall, Jan. 21, 191 1). 

Unconscious leakage from mind to mind is not 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 89 

a new hypothesis. We have good evidence for it 
{e.g. the leakage of the idea " seven " from Mr. 
Piddington's sealed letter: the leakage of the pas- 
sage about " moly " in the " one-horse-dawn " 
experiment). 

But, it may be said, the Willett scripts show an 
elaborate design in the way the facts are communi- 
cated. Can we suppose this design was not due to 
conscious agency? I answer by another question: 
Is the elaborate design of a kind that forces us to 
assume purpose? There is certainly what might 
fairly be called an elaborate association of ideas, 
and this is reflected in the scripts, but I have 
shown, I think, that this association might have 
been in Mrs. Verrall's subconscious mind. Of 
design in communication the evidence is much less 
clear. Much is made of the fact that the allusions 
are given in a scholar-like form, that they are 
veiled and fragmentary, and that the clue seems 
purposely withheld. But the scholar-like form 
would be natural to Mrs. Verrall, and we know that 
telepathic messages do often come through in a 
veiled and fragmentary form. They did when Dr. 
Verrall made his famous " one-horse dawn " ex- 
periment, and yet the veiling was no part of his 
plan. And if the clue was purposely withheld, why 
was it given in the end to the very person, Mrs. 



go THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Verrall, from whom it ought to have been kept till 
all was complete? 

I suggest therefore that the effect of purposive 
design is accidental, due to the chance that Mrs. 
Verrall's subconscious mind, owing to her sight 
of Willett script A, was working in Jan.-Mar., 19 14, 
on the Dionysius-Philoxenus cycle of ideas and 
that Mrs. Willett' s mind could at first receive frag- 
ments of them, but only fragments, as her own 
insistence on her difficulty in catching the ideas 
indicates. I suggest also that she wove round them 
fancies of her own, e.g. that Mrs. Verrall was not 
to be told, and that there was an important experi- 
ment on foot, etc. Then Mrs. Verrall's mind, I 
assume, drifted away from the subject, and noth- 
ing further appears for a long while in the Willett 
scripts. But when Mrs. Verrall sits for script with 
Mrs. Willett, a year and a half later, the contact 
of the two minds happens to revive subconsciously 
the dormant memories of the Dionysius-Philoxenus 
story and this time it emerges in a form that is prac- 
tically complete, just as we often do find that 
telepathic impressions are much more clearly re- 
ceived when the communicator is in the room. (It 
would be of great interest, by the way, to know if 
this was the first time that Mrs. Verrall sat for 
script with Mrs. Willett since the writing of the 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 91 

evidential scripts B and C.) Once more, I suggest 
that Mrs. Willett's subconscious mind wove fancies 
of its own, but this time fancies that do not tally 
with the earlier ones, e.g. they now assume that 
Mrs. Verrall ought to have been told. Thus we 
have, I submit, a hypothesis with certain merits of 
its own to put against the hypothesis of Dr. Verrall 
communicating. I do not claim it as more plausible. 
Apart from the fact that there are other reasons 
to doubt survival I do not think it as plausible. 
Both hypotheses have weak points : one involves an 
astonishing lapse of memory on Dr. Verrall's part, 
the other a remarkable extension of unconscious 
leakage. 

And what I want to urge now is the imperative 
need both for further observation and further ex- 
periment to help us to decide. I admit that I can- 
not conceive any one experiment as decisive. The 
evidence, from the nature of the case, cannot, so 
far as I can see, ever be demonstrative : it can only 
be cumulative. We have no demonstrative evidence 
even of the existence of individual incarnate minds 
other than our own. But that is all the more reason 
for making as many experiments as possible. And 
with some hesitation, for I have no claim whatever 
to speak as an investigator, I would ask first if 
more test-questions and more exploratory ques- 



92 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

tions could not be put to the automatists. For 
instance, has any attempt been made to find out 
from the automatist in trance any explanation of 
that strange lapse of memory? If so, with what 
result? Test-questions were put, I believe, through 
Mrs. Piper to the supposed communicator Myers. 
Could not similar questions be put through Mrs. 
Willett to Verrall? If they have been put, what 
has been the result? And further, I would urge 
that every possible opportunity should be taken to 
repeat the experiment of sealed letters. It is true, 
of course, as Mrs. Sidgwick says, that these expert 
ments are not crucial. My own paper indicates that 
the contents might leak from one mind to the other 
while the writer was still alive. But if a large 
number were written, if, in a large proportion of 
cases, the contents were not disclosed till after 
death and then were disclosed, should we not all 
feel, in spite of loopholes for doubt, that the posi- 
tive evidence had gained enormously? Failure in 
the experiment would, of course, add a certain 
amount of weight to the negative side. But that 
seems to me exactly the reason for making it. If 
the evidence must be cumulative, and it seems to 
me that it must, we cannot test its weight unless we 
take full account of negative as well as positive 
results. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 93 

Note. Reading Mr. Balfour's most courteous 
and interesting answer to my paper, I notice that, 
— entirely through my own looseness of phrasing, 
— I may have given the impression that I doubt 
survival after death. On the contrary, I believe 
in survival ; what I doubt is the possibility of direct 
purposeful communication with minds still incar- 
nate. I ought to have made this clear and I wish 
to do so now, since all these matters are important, 
although this special point does not affect the actual 
discussion between Mr. Balfour and myself. 



III. 

THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS: A REPLY. 



III. 

THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS : A REPLY. 

By the Right Hon. Gerald W. Balfour. 

By the courtesy of the Editor of the Proceedings I 
have been allowed to see the foregoing paper by 
Miss Stawell in manuscript, and invited to comment 
upon it. I accept the invitation all the more readily 
inasmuch as I was unfortunately prevented by ill- 
ness from being present at the meeting at which the 
paper was read. 

Miss Sta well's criticism of the argument for sur- 
vival put forward in " The Ear of Dionysius " is 
of that serious and thoughtful kind that helps to 
throw light upon a problem even where one cannot 
agree with it. The alternative hypothesis which 
she suggests is not one that commends itself to my 
judgement. But it touches upon points of real 
interest, and the care and acumen with which she 
has handled the subject deserve respectful consid- 
eration. 

The point of view from which Miss Stawell 
starts is not quite the same as that which I took 

97 



98 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

up in my paper. Let me quote her own words: 
" [Mr. Balfour's] argument that the communicator 
was really Dr. Verrall's discarnate mind is certainly 
extremely cogent. But I do not feel it entirely con- 
vincing. There is a difficulty, and, apart from this, 
another hypothesis is possible. Of course, if there 
were no general reason to doubt survival after 
death, there would be less reason to trouble 
about another hypothesis. But there is plenty of 
reason for doubt, because of all the negative evi- 
dence that exists, some of it collected by the S.P.R. 
itself, e.g. the failure of test-questions, or the 
inability, shown on more than one occasion, to state 
the contents of a sealed envelope written before the 
communicator's death. ,, 

Again, after giving her own alternative explana- 
tion, Miss Stawell sums up the case as follows: 
" We have, I submit, a hypothesis with certain 
merits of its own to put against the hypothesis of 
Dr. Verrall communicating. I do not claim it as 
more plausible. Apart from the fact that there are 
other reasons to doubt survival I do not think it as 
plausible. Both hypotheses have weak points: one 
involves an astonishing lapse of memory on Dr. 
Verrall's part, the other a remarkable extension of 
unconscious leakage." 

It is evident from these passages that Miss 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 99 

Stawell avowedly starts from the assumption that 
survival is antecedently improbable on general 
grounds, that is to say, on grounds independent of 
any considerations that are to be drawn from the 
facts of the particular case under review. Were it 
not for these external grounds of objection she 
would prefer my explanation to her own. 

No doubt the attitude of any of us towards this 
or that suggested explanation of a particular case 
must inevitably depend on the presuppositions or 
predispositions which we bring to the study of it. 
Those who disbelieve in the possibility of survival 
will prefer any explanation to one that rests on 
survival. Those who disbelieve in the possibility 
of telepathy — and they are still probably the ma- 
jority among scientific men — will be equally em- 
phatic in also rejecting the explanation offered by 
Miss Stawell. On the other hand, those who on 
general grounds have already come to regard sur- 
vival as probable will be prepossessed in favour of 
spirit communication as against elaborate and com- 
plicated hypotheses of subliminal agency. 

In these circumstances it seems to me that in a 
paper professing to deal with only a single case of 
what purports to be spirit communication, the 
proper course is to start from the assumption that 
survival and spirit communication are open ques- 



ioo THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

tions; and this is what I tried to do. Once we begin 
to weight the scales, as Miss Stawell has done, with 
considerations of a general character, it is difficult 
to see how there can be any logical halting place 
short of a discussion extending beyond the par- 
ticular case to all the pros and cons by which our 
final conclusions will be determined. At that rate 
a paper would quickly swell to a volume. 

An obvious corollary from what has just been 
said is that no single case should be treated as 
crucial and decisive. Here I am entirely at one 
with Miss Stawell, and I may add with all serious 
students of the subject. The evidence must be 
cumulative. In the end, the hypothesis which offers 
the simplest explanation of all the observed facts 
bearing on the question at issue will doubtless be- 
come generally accepted. But we are far from 
having reached that end as yet. I do not claim for 
the " Dionysius Case " more than that it is an im- 
portant contribution to the evidence, and that it tells 
strongly in favour of survival and of the actuality 
of communication from " the other side." Miss 
Stawell herself, it appears, is inclined towards a 
similar view, though much more doubtingly and 
waveringly. 

This brings me to the main substance of her 
paper. Miss Stawell finds in the facts of the case 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 101 

as narrated a difficulty which militates against the 
supposition that the communications really proceed 
from Dr. Verrall. Further, she offers an alterna- 
tive explanation which, even if less plausible on the 
whole, and considered by itself, than that which I 
have advocated, is nevertheless regarded by her as 
sufficiently plausible to come into serious competi- 
tion with it. 

Miss Stawell states her "difficulty" thus: "In 
the two leading scripts (Feb. 28, Mar. 2, 1914, 
Scripts B and C) the communicator said that Mrs. 
Verrall was to hear nothing of the matter, and that 
there was much more to be got through. Yet, 
abruptly, immediately after this, all communication 
on the topic ceased, so far as Mrs. Willett was con- 
cerned, for a whole year and a half, until suddenly, 
at a sitting where Mrs. Verrall herself was present, 
the subject was re-opened, the clue given, and great 
surprise expressed that Mrs. Verrall had received 
no message on the matter. This implies a strange 
lapse of memory on the part of the communicator, 
so strange that one is forced to ask, Can it be ex- 
plained satisfactorily on the hypothesis that there 
really was a deliberate conscious personality con- 
trolling the communications? I find it hard to 
think so." 

That the surprise expressed in the later scripts 
is inconsistent with the instructions given in the 



102 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

earlier ones is clear; and undoubtedly the most 
natural account to be given of this inconsistency 
is to ascribe it, as I have done in my paper, to a 
lapse of memory on the part of the communicators. 
Miss Stawell's alternative hypothesis explains the 
inconsistency by arbitrarily transferring the respon- 
sibility for it to the automatist herself. On this 
point let me note that the inconsistency requires to 
be not merely explained but explained away, if the 
incident is to lose the highly exceptional and per- 
haps unprecedented character which I assigned to 
it. What is so rare is that scripts written by the 
same automatist should contain statements start- 
lingly at variance with each other. The question 
whether the true origin of the statements is external 
or subliminal is from this point of view irrelevant. 
It is what may be called in a non-committal phrase 
" the script memory " which in our experience is 
so seldom found to be seriously at fault. 

When I treated the inconsistency in the scripts 
as due to forget fulness on the part of the communi- 
cators and added that I had no explanation to offer, 
I meant that I had no explanation to offer which 
seemed to me preferable to the assumption that a 
lapse of memory had taken place. But I must can- 
didly own that when I wrote my paper I attached 
no particular significance to the incident, though I 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 103 

noted it as being very unusual. The use made of it 
by Miss Stawell was entirely unforeseen by me. I 
still think that she has greatly overrated her " dif- 
ficulty," and that such a lapse of memory after a 
year and a half, during which the subject was 
dropped so far as communications through Mrs. 
Willett were concerned, is not inconsistent with the 
control of the communications by a "deliberate 
conscious personality." But for those who attach 
more importance to her objection than I do, I ven- 
ture to suggest an explanation of this discrepancy 
in the scripts which I think well within the bounds 
of possibility, though I refrained from offering it 
in my paper. 

Let us see just how the case stands. Script B 
tells us that Mrs. Verrall is to hear nothing of the 
matter at present. 

Script C says there is much more to follow, and 
that until the effort is completed the portions as 
they come are not to be seen by any other auto- 
matist. 

Script D, returning to the subject a year and a 
half later, asks if the Satire has been identified, and 
finding Mrs. Verrall unable to give a reply, ex- 
presses surprise that the messages concerning it and 
references to a Cave have not been passed on to 
her. 



104 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

Finally, in Script E, a fortnight later, Gurney, 
upon being informed that all the classical allusions 
are now understood by the investigators, exclaims 
"Good— At last!" 

In the long interval between C and D a complete 
change has taken place in the attitude of the com- 
municators. Can anything have occurred during 
this period to account for the change? 

It is certain that the expectation held out in C 
of further contributions to the problem was not ful- 
filled in any scripts produced by Mrs. Willett be- 
tween the dates of C and D. Of these there were 
about a dozen altogether. They dealt almost 
exclusively with a single subject of a private 
nature which had no connection whatever with the 
Dionysius case, nor with either of the two prin- 
cipal communicators concerned in it. It does not, 
however, follow from this that the Dionysius topic 
had been wholly lost sight of by the group on the 
other side. The statements in B and C do indeed 
strongly suggest, if they do not directly assert, that 
a return to it would shortly be made in subsequent 
Willett scripts. But in C there is also something 
very like an intimation that attempts would be 
made to produce cross-correspondences on the sub- 
ject in the scripts of other automatists. That at 
all events is the meaning I attached at the time to 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 105 

* 

the instruction that " until the effort is completed 
the portions as they come are not to be seen by any 
other automatist "; so much so that from then 
onwards I began to look out very carefully for any 
signs of such cross-correspondences. 

The suggestion I have to make is this. For some 
undisclosed reason the intention to send additional 
matter on the Dionysius topic through Mrs. Willett 
was not carried out. Possibly Gurney, who appears 
to take chief charge of arrangements on the other 
side, was unwilling to allow the important series 
of scripts, occupied with a totally different subject, 
that began shortly after the date of Script C, to be 
interrupted. In the meantime attempts were made 
to refer to the Dionysius case elsewhere. There 
is good ground for believing that these attempts 
met with at least a partial measure of success in 
the scripts of Mrs. King. (See Appendix to my 
original paper, Proc. 'S.P.R., Vol. XXIX., p. 239) 
It is quite possible that the communicators may 
have thought that they had succeeded in " getting 
through " more than they actually had. Uncer- 
tainty as to what has and what has not been effec- 
tively transmitted and duly recorded by automatists 
is frequently admitted in the scripts, and perhaps 
rather specially so in Mrs. King's script. As time 
passed the group on the other side may have 



io6 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

thought that sufficient lights had been given, and 
have assumed that the investigators had discovered 
the solution of the puzzle. Had we really discov- 
ered it the instructions that Mrs. Verrall " is to 
hear nothing of this at present" and that "until 
the effort is completed the portions as they come 
are not to be seen by any other automatist " would 
have ceased to be applicable; and Mrs. Verrall 
would have been taken into our counsel and been 
shown the scripts. 

If this is really what happened, the surprise ex- 
pressed in D becomes intelligible. It is inconsistent 
with the instructions given in B and C, but would 
not be inconsistent with the impressions subse- 
quently formed by the communicators during the 
long interval that followed. The exclamation "At 
last! " used by Gurney on hearing that the classical 
allusions were now all understood, would also be 
not only intelligible but natural, if he took the view 
that the information supplied to us before Script D 
was produced had been sufficient, or ought to have 
been sufficient, to give us the solution of the 
problem. 

I offer this explanation for what it may be worth. 
There is too much of the conjectural element in it 
to satisfy me. But in any case I should prefer it 
to the explanation given by Miss Stawell's alterna- 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 107 

tive hypothesis, in which conjecture seems to me 
to play at least as prominent a part. 

To that alternative hypothesis I now turn. It 
may be summed in three main propositions: 

(1) That Mrs. Verrall possessed, consciously or 
subconsciously, all the classical knowledge implied 
in the scripts. 

(2) That after receiving the message in Script A 
she subconsciously wove together a number of 
topics, not for the most part connected with one 
another by any obvious associations, into a coherent 
whole, the separate items of which, by reason of 
this subconscious activity, " leaked " from her sub- 
conscious mind into that of Mrs. Willett and 
emerged in the successive scripts, Mrs. Willett's 
own latent memories co-operating in the process. 

(3) That the collocation of the ideas thus 
brought together may be said to exhibit " design " ; 
but that of " purpose in communication " as dis- 
tinguished from " design " the scripts furnish no 
sufficient evidence. 

This account of the matter is ingenious and care- 
fully thought out; but I am unable to accept it as 
probable. 

As regards (1), everything turns upon whether 
Mrs. Verrall had at some period before the produc- 
tion of the evidential scripts (B, C and D) become 



io8 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

acquainted with the story of Philoxenus, and more 
especially with the version of that story implied 
in the scripts. If she had not, cadit quaestio: the 
alternative hypothesis falls to the ground. 

Miss Stawell thinks I have dismissed too easily 
the possibility that the scripts had their source of 
inspiration in Mrs. Verrall's subconscious mind. I 
admit that when stating that Mrs. Verrall " knew 
nothing about Philoxenus or his poem," I took it 
too much for granted that she never had known 
anything. Present ignorance, however complete, 
cannot wholly exclude the possibility of knowledge 
once possessed but since forgotten. But there are 
cases — and this, I think, is one of them — where it 
may go far towards doing so; especially where 
there is really nothing to be set on the other side 
except pure conjecture. I can readily believe that 
at some time or other in the course of her classical 
studies Mrs. Verrall had come across a mention of 
the poet Philoxenus and afterwards forgotten about 
him. But we have to suppose far more than that 
in order to account for the distinctly recondite 
knowledge concerning the plot of the Cyclops ex- 
hibited in the scripts. Miss Stawell' s own sugges- 
tion is that Mrs. Verrall was led to look up the 
associations connected with the Ear of Dionysius 
by her conversation on the subject with Dr. Verrall 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 109 

in 191 o, and in this manner acquired the necessary 
information. Conjectures of this kind are plausible 
enough in themselves. But they are not easy to 
reconcile with the fact that in January, 19 14, the 
message which (according to Miss Stawell) pro- 
duced such very remarkable results in Mrs. Ver- 
rall's subconscious mind, found no appropriate 
response in her normal memories; and that in 
August, 191 5, even a study of the reference books 
on the subject failed to recall to her that she had 
ever heard of Philoxenus. Again, Miss Stawell 
thinks it " not far-fetched to suppose that Mrs. 
Verrall at some time or other had at least glanced 
through the pages "of Professor Smyth's Greek 
Melic Poets. Perhaps not; but what evidence we 
have is in the other direction. My strong impres- 
sion is — though I cannot absolutely vouch for the 
fact — that Mrs. Verrall told me she believed she 
had never looked into the book until she had re- 
course to it in connection with the references in 
Script D; and Mrs. Salter (Miss Helen Verrall) 
informs me that she is sure her mother never had 
any previous occasion to use it. Unfortunately 
Mrs. Verrall is no longer with us to appeal to on 
points like this. As things are, it is perhaps hardly 
possible to carry the controversy further. I can 
only say that my personal opinion remains un- 



no THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

shaken. Mrs. Verrall herself was convinced that 
the Philoxenus story which contains the key to the 
puzzle was entirely new to her. I continue to be- 
lieve that she was right. 1 

(2) Coming next to Miss Stawell's account of 
the genesis of the scripts, let me begin by noting a 
point of detail. The order of events is supposed to 
be as follows : Mrs. Verrall (who is credited, as we 
have seen, with a complete, though latent knowl- 
edge of all the classical references in the scripts) 
receives the message contained in Script A. Her 
latent memories are thereby stimulated " just 
enough to make them active, but subconsciously not 
consciously." This subconscious activity in its turn 
produces a " leakage " of ideas from Mrs. Verrall 



1 Miss Stawell credits not only Mrs. Verrall, but also Mrs. 
Willett, with a more extensive subconscious knowledge than 
I should be prepared to allow probable. The more or less 
of Mrs. Willett's knowledge is in no way essential to Miss 
Stawell's main contention, and therefore I have not thought 
it worth while to discuss it. I must, however, take excep- 
tion to the argument by which she supports her opinion. 
'' It is plain," she writes, "that Mrs. Willett's conscious mind 
does forget very easily. When asked by Mr. Balfour (27 
May, 1916) what she knew about the 'Ear of Dionysius,' 
she said she had heard the expression but did not know the 
meaning of it. Yet only two years before she had written. 
in her normal consciousness, script containing a fairly full 
account of the Ear, a script of which she had kept an 
annotated copy to which, as Mr. Balfour tells us, she could 
refer at any time." Surely there is a fallacy here. It is true 
that Script A contains a description of the Ear of Dionysius. 
But it does not describe it by name. Unless Mrs. Willett 
already knew that the description applied to the Ear of 
Dionysius, she might have read and re-read Script A without 
ever discovering the fact. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS in 

to Mrs. Willett, and is thus the true source and 
origin of the " evidential scripts." 

What remains unexplained in this account is the 
origin of the message in Script A. Miss Stawell, 
of course, assumes that all the topics in this mes- 
sage had at one time or another been within Mrs. 
Willett's normal knowledge, and might, therefore, 
have emerged in her script without any external 
prompting. But even granting this, why did they 
emerge at all? On Miss Stawell's hypothesis no 
answer to this question is forthcoming. On the 
hypothesis that Dr. Verrall was the real as well as 
the ostensible communicator, the answer is plain. 
Evidently the message was sent in preparation for 
what was to follow. 

This, however, is, after all, a point of minor 
importance, though not, I think, without some 
interest. 

A much more serious objection to Miss Stawell's 
account of how the scripts originated is one of which 
she is sensible herself, though I doubt whether she 
has realised the full force of it. The essential basis 
of her explanation is " unconscious leakage " of 
ideas from mind to mind. Miss Stawell has not 
told us exactly what she means by " unconscious 
leakage." The term may signify much or little. 
If A represents the mind from which, and B the 



ii2 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

mind to which the leakage is assumed to take place, 
are both A and B to be regarded as unconscious 
of what is happening, or only A? And further, 
when we speak of A, do we mean supraliminal A 
only, or subliminal A also, and similarly of B? I 
am not quite sure, but I think Miss Stawell uses 
the term in its widest significance, which excludes 
any kind of awareness or intention either on the 
one side or the other, and either supraliminal or 
subliminal. In other words the whole process is 
to be taken as involuntary and automatic. It is in 
this sense that the term is to be understood in the 
discussion which follows. 

Miss Stawell tells us that unconscious leakage is 
not a new hypothesis, and that we have good evi- 
dence of it. Certainly it is not a new hypothesis; 
on the other hand, the actual evidence in support 
of it is singularly scanty. The reason of this may 
be, at least in part, that such evidence is, from the 
nature of the case, difficult to obtain. But it may 
also be owing to the rarity of the phenomenon 
itself. 

Two supposed examples are cited by Miss Stawell 
— the case of Mr. Piddington's sealed letter, and 
the leakage of the passage about " moly " in the 
" one-horse dawn " experiment. Neither of these 
can be regarded as conclusive, even if we ignore 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 113 

the possibility of chance-coincidence. The incident 
of Mr. Piddington's letter forms part of a compli- 
cated cross-correspondence. Miss Johnson, to 
whom we owe a careful review of all the circum- 
stances (see Proc. S.P.R., Vol. XXIV., pp. 222 ff.), 
finds in them strong evidence of a single external 
directing intelligence; and though she thinks that 
this intelligence may have utilised telepathic com- 
munication between the automatists concerned and 
Mr. Piddington, it is obvious that the introduction 
on the stage of such a deus ex machina, while not 
negativing the hypothesis of unconscious leakage, 
does render it superfluous. 

As to the passage about " the herb moly " in 
the "one-horse dawn" experiment, it is true that 
the appearance of it in Mrs. Verrall's script could 
not be directly due to any conscious mental activity 
on Dr. Verrall's part. But we know that he was 
trying to transmit certain words to Mrs. Verrall, 
and we cannot be sure that this conscious effort 
on his part was not a conditio sine qua non of the 
transmission of certain other words of the connec- 
tion of which with the subject of the experiment 
he was only subconsciously aware. For a fuller dis- 
cussion of this question, perhaps I may refer to an 
article of mine published in Proc, Vol. XXV., in 
which I pointed out that no proof of purely sub- 



H4 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

conscious telepathy can ever be obtained from 
experiments. All experiments necessarily star: 
from supraliminal activity; and having once started 
from supraliminal activity it is impossible to be cer- 
tain that one is justified in eliminating it from 
results. 

If proof is to be obtained of unconscious leakage 
it is among cases of spontaneous {i.e. non-experi- 
mental) telepathy that we must look for it. 
Veridical phantasms of the living that have ap- 
peared to persons unknown to the presumed agent, 
collective hallucinations, and the psychological 
characteristics of crowds, will perhaps be found to 
afford the best examples — in other words, cases 
where nothing more complex is in question than 
sensory impressions or emotional states. 

Whether even single mental concepts are ever 
transmitted by unconscious leakage is doubtful. 
What we have in the Dionysius case is a series of 
mental concepts, apparently unconnected, or only 
loosely connected, but ultimately found to be cun- 
ningly linked together by a central idea that unites 
all the rest into a single whole. The transmission 
of a combined scheme of concepts in the way sug- 
gested has, I feel confident, no sort of warrant from 
experience. Miss Stawell may well call such an 
extension of unconscious leakage " remarkable." 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 115 

Can we say that the hypothesis, even though 
unwarranted by experience, is nevertheless intrin- 
sically plausible? I do not think so. Unconscious 
leakage must from the nature of the case be in 
large measure at the mercy of chance. It would 
be unreasonable to expect from it the unity and 
coherence that might be looked for in a message 
deliberately sent by an intelligent communicator. 
Yet it is just such unity and coherence which are 
exceptionally manifest in these Willett scripts. 
What we see in them is not chance but design. 
Moreover, they show a noticeable absence of any- 
thing like surplusage or extraneous matter. There 
is hardly an idea to be found in them that does not 
contribute to the building up of the scheme as a 
whole. Even granting for a moment that the de- 
sign itself originated in Mrs. Verrall's subconscious 
mind, how can mere leakage account for the fact 
that practically no ideas emerged in the scripts 
except such as were relevant to the design? It 
seems to me that this is a real difficulty, and that 
neither the rapport which may fairly be taken to 
have existed between Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Willett, 
nor any aid which the dormant memories of the 
latter may be supposed to have rendered, suffice to 
meet it. Indeed I see no way of meeting it fully 
except to suppose that Mrs. Verrall's subconscious 



n6 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

mind was at the time occupied with these ideas and 
with no others. If the leakage occurred contem- 
poraneously with the emergence of the ideas in the 
scripts of Feb. 28 and March 2 (Scripts B and C), 
the coincidence must be ascribed to a happy acci- 
dent. If it extended over a period antecedent to 
the emergence, are we to suppose that Mrs. Ver- 
rall's subliminal concentration on the Ear of 
Dionysius extended over the whole of the period? 
This is possible, but is it also plausible? 

Other difficulties suggest themselves which I can 
only briefly indicate. Mrs. Willett's automatic 
productions are incomparably more striking than 
Mrs. Verrall's, and the Dionysius Case is among 
the most striking of all. Yet we are asked to sup- 
pose that the true source both of materials and of 
plan in this case was Mrs. Verrall's subconscious 
mind, whence they leaked into that of Mrs. Willett. 
If so, how comes it that nothing remotely similar 
to these scripts appeared in Mrs. Verrall's own 
automatic writings? And again, if the influence of 
Mrs. Verrall's subliminal mind on Mrs. Willett's 
scripts is so powerful as the hypothesis implies, how 
comes it that that influence has not left a more con- 
spicuous impress on the Willett scripts generally? 
Perhaps the Statius case may be cited in reply to 
this question. I agree that the Statius Case and the 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 117 

Dionysius Case must stand or fall together, and that 
to explain the one is almost certainly to explain 
the other also. But they form only a small fraction 
of the total volume of Willett scripts. It is true 
that cross-correspondences occur from time to 
time between Mrs. Verrall's scripts and Mrs. Wil- 
lett's, and may, from Miss Stawell's standpoint, be 
held to indicate telepathic leakage from one writer 
to the other. None of these cross-correspondences, 
however, are at all on the scale of leakage required 
to explain the Dionysius Case; nor do they, so far 
as I can judge, markedly surpass either in number 
or quality the cross-correspondences to be found 
between Mrs. Willett's scripts and those of other 
members of our group of automatists. 

Considerations like this cannot, of course, be 
properly appreciated without a full knowledge of 
all the scripts. I will not dwell on them further, 
but will pass on to the last of the three proposi- 
tions which summarise Miss Stawell's alternative 
hypothesis. 

Miss Stawell draws a sharp distinction between 
" design " and " purpose in communication/' " De- 
sign/' in the sense of " an elaborate association of 
ideas," she admits and ascribes to Mrs. Verrall's 
subconscious mind. " Purpose in communication " 
she disputes, and the appearance of it she 



n8 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

ascribes to the subconscious mind of the autom- 
atist. 

The distinction between design and purpose, and 
the separation of roles between Mrs. Verrall and 
Mrs. Willett, were inevitably forced on Miss 
Stawell by the premises from which she starts. 
She rejects — I believe quite rightly — the supposi- 
tion that Mrs. Willett had ever known the story of 
Philoxenus. It follows that Mrs. Willett could not 
have originated the " design." The hypothesis of 
spirit communication being excluded, responsibility 
for the design is fixed upon Mrs. Verrall. But 
Miss Stawell insists that the associated ideas passed 
from Mrs. Verrall to Mrs. Willett by " unconscious 
leakage." Now, unconscious leakage is clearly 
incompatible with " purpose in communication." 
In fact it is the very opposite of it. Hence any 
appearance of purpose must either be explained 
away as illusory, or it is upon Mrs. Willett that 
the responsibility for it must be thrown. 

To my mind this treatment of the matter is 
forced and unnatural. I look upon the " elaborate 
association of ideas " (or, as I should prefer to 
describe it, the skilful construction of a problem) as 
forming part and parcel of the manifestation of 
purpose in the scripts, and as practically inseparable 
from it. Miss Stawell herself seems tacitly to 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 119 

admit the closeness of the relation between the two. 
For she allows that " the way in which the facts 
are communicated " might be evidence of purpose. 
In particular she mentions the withholding of the 
clue all through Scripts B and C, and its final 
revelation in D. Is not this the very attitude of 
one who propounds a riddle, and deliberately waits 
before producing the answer to it? And, on the 
other hand, if the materials of the problem found 
their way into the scripts through the operation of 
unconscious leakage, should we not expect the cen- 
tral and dominating idea of the combination to leak 
out early instead of late in the history of the case? 
Miss Stawell, however, has her counter-question 
ready. " If," she asks, " the clue was purposely 
withheld, why was it given in the end to the very 
person, Mrs. Verrall, from whom it ought to have 
been kept till all was complete ? " 

The argument in support of purposiveness is not 
really met by raising a difficulty on the other side, 
even if that difficulty was a formidable one. But 
is it so formidable? Surely there may have been 
good reasons in February and March, 1914, for 
asking that the scripts should be kept from Mrs. 
Verrall " for the present," and yet those reasons 
might have lost their weight a year and a half later. 
My own view is that the communicators had for- 



120 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

gotten that the injunction had ever been laid. But 
whether they had forgotten this or not, they may 
well have thought that, the investigators having 
failed to solve the problem, the time had now come 
to bring matters to a conclusion by supplying the 
key to the enigma themselves. The analogy of the 
Statius Case deserves to be considered in this con- 
nection. 1 

Evidence of purpose is, however, by no means 
confined to that indirectly furnished by the con- 
struction of the problem and the manner of its 
presentment, but is to be found scattered in plenty 
throughout the scripts. 

The communicators tell us they are trying " an 
experiment;" it is "something good and worth 
doing," which takes the form of " a literary asso- 
cition of ideas pointing to the influence of two 
discarnate minds." The " Aristotelian " and the 
"Rationalist" (S.H.B. and A.W.V) are described 
as being engaged in "a particular task," an 
" effort " which still awaits completion. " The in- 
cident," we are informed, " was chosen as being 
evidential of identity; " and it is claimed that the 
combination is characteristic of its authors — that it 
is " A.W.ish " and " S.H.ish." 

Statements like these plainly imply purpose. 
How does Miss Stawell deal with them? By the 
1 See note at the end of this paper. 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 121 

simple expedient of sweeping them aside as 
" fancies " woven by Mrs. Willett round the ideas 
received by her from Mrs. Verrall. 

We unfortunately possess no general criterion by 
which genuine messages ab extra can be distin- 
guished from the imaginations and embroideries of 
the automatist. I am, therefore, far from asserting 
that the peculiar distribution of subconscious activi- 
ties assumed by Miss Stawell is inadmissible. But 
this, I think, may fairly be said; that so far from 
affording support to her alternative hypothesis it 
is an additional difficulty in the way of that 
hypothesis being accepted. 

Why Miss Stawell should be so wedded to the 
idea of " unconscious leakage " I own I do not fully 
understand. If I were seeking some way of escape 
from the hypothesis of spirit communication, and 
were willing to believe that Mrs. Verrall, possessing, 
though partly in the form of latent memories, all 
the raw material required, had evolved out of them 
the complicated design presented in the scripts, I 
should see no advantage in trying to discredit the 
clear evidence of purpose which those same scripts 
exhibit. On the contrary, I should be inclined to 
ascribe both design and purpose to the same source, 
namely Mrs. Verrall's subconscious mind. The dif- 
ficulties which this explanation of the case involves 



122 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

are serious enough, no doubt. That the subcon- 
scious mind of a living person, herself an auto- 
matist, should elaborate such a puzzle and communi- 
cate it telepathically to another automatist in order 
to manufacture fictitious evidence for survival, the 
normal self of the communicator remaining the 
while entirely innocent of what was taking place, 
is a hypothesis with as little support from experi- 
ence as the " unconscious leakage " which finds 
favour with Miss Stawell. But at least it avoids 
some of the objections to which I cannot but hold 
the latter to be open; and among them the artificial 
separation of the construction of the puzzle from 
the use to which it is put. 

Let me in conclusion repeat once more that 
though I am unable to agree with Miss Stawell, I 
nevertheless regard her paper as a valuable contri- 
bution to the study of the subject. It raises ques- 
tions which ought to be raised; and I frankly admit 
that she has directed the lance of her criticism 
against what is probably the least protected point 
in the armour of her adversary. May I on my side 
hope that the considerations I have urged in reply 
will go at least some way towards reconciling her 
to a view of the case which already, as it would 
seem, she only half-heartedly opposes? 



NOTE ON THE ANALOGIES BETWEEN 

THE STATIUS CASE AND THE 

DIONYSIUS CASE. 



Note on the Analogies between the Statius 

Case and the Dionysius Case. 

In my original paper I called attention to certain fea- 
tures which were common to the Dionysius Case and 
to the Statius Case which preceded it. 

Both present a literary problem the solution of 
which appears to be purposely withheld at first, and 
is finally revealed only after the lapse of a considerable 
interval of time. 

In both the part of principal communicator is as- 
signed to Dr. Verrall, though in the Dionysius Case he 
is associated with his friend S. H. Butcher. 

Both purport to furnish evidence of the continued 
existence after death of their presumptive author or 
authors. 

A careful comparison of the two cases shews that 
there are other points of resemblance, as well as some 
points of difference, which it may be worth while to 
note. 

The two cases are sbnilar in that : 

(i) Both open with a message to Mrs. Verrall. 

(2) In both the final clue is given in Mrs. Ver- 

rall's presence. 

(3) In both the sitting at which Mrs. Verrall was 

present was her only sitting with Mrs. 
Willett during the periods covered by the 
two sets of scripts respectively. 

(4) In both the interval of silence, during which 

the subject appeared to be ignored, was 

125 



126 THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 

occupied with scripts relating to matters of 
a private nature. 
The cases differ in that : 

(i) The Statius Case is started in a trance-script, 
but developed and concluded in three 
scripts written in a state of normal con- 
sciousness; whereas the Dionysius Case is 
started in a script produced in a normal 
state, but developed and concluded in three 
trance-scripts. 
(2) The interval of silence occurred in the Statius 
case between the first and second scripts, 
in the Dionysius Case between the third 
and fourth. In the Statius Case the sitter 
present when the subject was resumed was 
myself, in the Dionysius Case Mrs. Verrall. 
While I think these points of similarity and differ- 
ence may be worth noting, and, in some instances, not 
without interest as bearing on the present contro- 
versy, it does not appear to me that any important 
argument can be drawn from them in support of 
either one side or the other. Miss Stawell asks 
whether Mrs. Verrall had any sitting with Mrs. Wil- 
lett during the interval between scripts C and D. The 
answer, as may be gathered from the above statement, 
is in the negative. In fact up to the date of script D 
Mrs. Verrall had not sat with Mrs. Willett since 
Sept. 8, 1 9.1 3, the date on which the final clue to the 
Statius problem was given. I cannot see, however, 
that this circumstance is in any way inconsistent with 
Dr. Verrall's being the real communicator; while, on 
the other hand, the fact that in the Statius Case the 
return to the subject occurred in two scripts produced 
not in Mrs. Verrall's presence but with myself as 



THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 127 

sitter, tells, so far as it goes, against the supposition 
that in the Dionysius case the resumption of the sub- 
ject was dependent upon Mrs. Verrall's attention 
being once more directed to it. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Achilles, 19, 20, 28 

Acis, 26, 29, 69, 70 

Acis and Galatea Story, 26, 

28, 35, 36, 40, 45, 59, 68, 69, 

70. 73, 74. 
Ai, 38 

Alpheus, 31, 86 
Antiphanes, 46 
Arethusa, 17, 31, 71, 72, 86 
Aristophanes, 11 ; clouds and 

frogs, 84; Plutus, 39, 40, 

84, 85 
Aristotelian friend, 30 
Aristotle, 19, 23, 24, 33, 65; 

Poetics, 24, 34, 35, 38, 45, 

73, 83 
Arnold's Forsaken Merman, 

69 
Ars Poetica, 31, 33 
Artemis, 31, 86 
Artificial scripts, 78 
Association of ideas, 21, 22, 

93 
Athenseus, 45 
Athenian expedition against 

Syracuse, 10, 11, 13 

Balaustion, 11, 13, 22 

Balfour, G. W., 16, 30, 46, 60, 
79, 83, 88, 93 ; reply to Miss 
Stawell's criticisms, 97 

Bayfield, Mr., 65 

Berries, 73 

Blest pair of Sirens, 71, 72 

Bliicher, 25 

Boot, 11, 18, 22\ sketch, 17 

Browning's Aristophanes' 
Apology, 11, 12 

Butcher, S. H., 23, 30, 37, 40, 
54, 81, S3; personal traits, 
64, 65 ; positive evidence of 



communication, 64; vision, 
record, 23 

Cam, Father, 21, 24 

Cambridge, 24 

Canongate, 21, 24 

Cave, 18, 28, 37 

Chance, 115 

Chance-coincidence, 77, 78, 
113 

Classical knowledge, 5, 6, 33, 
41; Mrs. Verrall's, 84, 85, 
86; Mrs. Willett's, 58, 59 J 
test of Mrs. Willett's, 48 

Communications from the 
dead, 63 ; design in, 89 ; de- 
sign vs. purpose, 117, 118; 
doubt, 93; positive evi- 
dence, 64 

Consciousness, 15 

Corcyra, II 

Cross-correspondences, 67, 68, 
70, 78, 104, 105, 113, 117 

Cyclopean, 38, 40 

Cyclopes, 27 

Cyclops, 27 

Cythera, 38, 40, 41 

Dante, 51 

Dark boy, 20, 25 

Design, 55, 89, 115 ; purpose 

and, 89, 117 
Dionysius, 3, 8, 12, 42, 45, 

passim 
Dionysius' Ear the lobe, 3 
Dithyrambs, 41, 45 
Doctored sense, 70, 71, 72 
Dreams, 87 
Dry den's Ode for St. Ce cilia' s 

Day, 72 
Dy Dy, 5, 8, n 



131 



132 



INDEX 



Ear, 37, 45 ; sketch, 32 
Ear of Dionysius, 21, 35, 80 
Ecate, 37 
Edinburgh, 24 
Ek e tee, 23 
Eleven, number, 79 
Encyclopedia Britannicd, 41, 

42 
Enna, 5, 9, 22 
Etna, Mount, 28 
Euripides, 5, 11, 13 
Evidence, cumulative, 91, 92, 

100 
Experiments, 90 

Filtered sense, 71, 72 
Flames, fanning of, 68 
Forgetfulness, 47, 56, 60, 82, 

87, 91, 92, 102, 108 
Fountain, 17, 20, 29 

Galatea, 26, 38, 70 

Galateia, 42, 44 

German Field Marshal, 20, 25 

Ghosts, 23, 37 

Golden numbers, 32 

Grote's History of Greece, 42, 

84 
Grotto, 4 
Gurney, Edmund, 18, 21, 31, 

32, 34, 40, 46, 104, 105, 106 

Handel, 26, 28, 72, 73 
Handel's Acis and Galatea, 50 
Hecate, 24, 37 
Heel of the Boot, 5, 11 
Hegelian friend, 30 
Hercules Furens, 12 
Holland, Mrs., 11, 13 
Holland Script, 12 
Homer, 18, 27, 28, 39 
Homer's Odyssey, 26 
Horace, 33 

Impatience, 40, 52, 65 
Infiltration of mind, 62 
Interpretations, 68 

Jealousy, 31, 33, 35, 39, 4L 
45 



Johnson, Miss, 60, 78, 79, 113 
Juvenal, 31, 34 

King, Mrs., 36, 67, 72 ; knowl- 
edge, 74 ; script of March 1, 

1914, 68; script of March 
13, 1914, 69; script of April 
1, 1915, 71 ; script of Oct. 3, 

191 5, 73; scripts, 105 
Kithara, 41 

Knowledge, 55, 58; forget- 
ting, 56, 108 

Latent mind. See Subcon- 
sciousness 

Laughter, 5, 9, 18 

Leakage from mind to mind, 
unconscious, 88, 91, no, 
in, 121 ; evidence for, 112 

Lempriere's Classical Diction- 
ary, 43, 58, 59, 84 

Literary riddle, 22, 26, 29, 41, 
53, 118, 119 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 4, 8, 15, 60 

Lotus Eaters, 27, 38 

Lovers' motif, 69, 70 

Lucus, 14 

Man with the glittering eyes, 

19 
Margaret, Margaret, 69 
Matthaei, Miss, 86 
May (Mrs. Verrall), 21, 22 
Memory, 60; latent, 88; see 

also Forgetfulness 
Milton's " Blest pair of 

Sirens," 72, 73 
Mind, subconscious contact, 

90; see also Leakage, etc. 
Misquotation, 14 
"Moonlight," 78 
Mousike, 30, 33, 65, 86 
Music, 45 
Music and verse combined, 

41, 72 
Musical instrument, 39, 45 
Myers, F. W. H., 92 

Newnham College, 86 
Nigger boys, 18, 28 



INDEX 



133 



Normal state of conscious- 
ness, 15 
Number eleven, 79 

Odyssey, 26, 38 

One ear, 17; sketch, 17 

One-eared place, 5, 8 

One eye, 28, 81 

One-eyed man, 17 

One-horsed dawn, 5, 8, 89, 

112, 113 
Orecchio, 4, 5, 8 
Ovid, 40; Metamorphoses, 26 

Personal traits, 64, 65 
Philemon, 5, II, 12, 14 
Philox, 38, 40, 61 
Philoxenus, 41, 44, 81, 85, 86; 

allusions in literature, 84; 

Cyclops or Galatea, 9, 39, 

42, 44, 45, 72 
Piddington, Mr., II, 36, 60, 89, 

112, 113 
Pipe, 9 

Piper, Mrs., 19, 92 
Polyphemus, 26, 27, 28, 38, 

81 
Polyphemus and Ulysses 

story, 26, 35, 45, 83 
Polyphera, 68, 69 
Poseidon, 18, 28 
Proserpine, 9, 18, 22 
Purpose, design and, 89, 117; 

evidence, 120 

Rape of Proserpine, 9 

Rapport, 115 

Rationalist friend, 30 

" Raymond," 77 

Riddle, 22, 26, 29, 41, 53, 118, 

119 
River, traveller looking 

across, 51 
Rose, 21, 24, 25, 37 

Salter, Mrs., 109 

Satire, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 

Script memory, 102 

Scripts, artificial, 78; design 



exhibited, 55 ; explanations, 
54; knowledge exhibited, 
55, 58; see also King, Mrs., 
Willett scripts 

Sealed letters, 80, 89, 92, 112 

Shades, 20 

Sic semper tyrannis, 19 

Sicilian Artemis, 86 

Sicilian Ode, 71, 72 

Sicily, 9, 27, 40, 41, 72 

Sidgwick, Henry, 19 

Sidgwick, Mrs., 60, 92 

Sinclair, May, 87 

Slaves, 5, 13 

Smith's Dictionary of Greek 
and Roman Biography and 
Mythology, 31, 41, 42, 43; 
61, 84 

Smyth, H. W., 44, 45, 46; 
Greek Melic Poets, 43, 58, 
81, 84, 86, 109 

Society for Psychical Re- 
search, 3 ; meeting on April 
26, 191 7, 77 

Stagirite, 30, 33 

Statius Case, 51, 116, 117, 120; 
analogies with Dionysius 
Case, 125 ; criticisms an- 
swered, 52; Dionysius Case 
and, 53 

Stephen man, 20, 29, 71 

Stone-quarries, 4, 8, 13, 21, 
35, 38, 39, 4i, 45, 80 

Stones, throwing, 68, 69 

Stones in the market place, 71 

Stawell, Miss F. M., discus- 
sion of evidence of sur- 
vival presented, 77; reply 
of Mr. Balfour, 97 

Styx, 18, 28 

Subconsciousness, 56, 83, 84 

Subliminal activity, 112, 116 

Supraliminal activity, 112, 114 

Survival, personal, discussion 
of evidence by Miss Sta- 
well, 77; doubt, 93, 98, 99; 
evidence, 22, 52; evidence 
must be cumulative, 91, 92, 
100 ; reasons for doubt, 80; 
scripts affording evidence, 



134 



INDEX 



3 ; summary of evidence in 

" Ear of Dionysius," 80 
Swinburne, 18, 25 
Syracuse, 4, 5, 22, 31, 71, 80; 

Athenian expedition against, 

10, ii, 13 

Tarentum, 11 

Telepathy, 8, 61, 62, 78, 79, 

09, 113, 114, 117 
Tennyson, 9, 10, 19 
Test questions, 92 
Theocritus, 9 

Threttanelo (dperraveXS), 39 
Thrumming, 39, 45 
Thucydides, 4 
Trance, 48 

Trance-scripts, 15, 16 
Traveller looking across a 

river, 51 
Trident, 18, 28 
Tyrant, 20, 39 

Ulysses, 10, 19, 20, 26, 28; 

see also Polyphemus, etc. 

Verrall, A. W., 6, 23, 30, 54, 
81; dark boy, 25; doubt as 
to his communication, 80; 
hypothesis against his com- 
munication, 91 ; personal 
traits, 65 ; positive evidence 
of communication, 64; 
Smyth's Greek Me lie Poets, 
44, 58 

Verrall, Miss Helen, 109 



Verrall, Mrs,, 21, 36, 37, 60, 
81 ; classical knowledge, 84, 
85, 86; note of Jan. 19, 

1914, 6; subconscious mind, 
84, 108; unconscious leak- 
age of mind, 88; passim 

Volcano, 29; sketch, 17 

Wellington boot, 18, 22 

Wellington school, 25 

Whispering gallery, 4, 5 

Waters, 68, 69 

Willett, Mrs., classical learn- 
ing, 48, 58, 82; conscious- 
ness and trance, 15 ; knowl- 
edge, integrity and good 
faith, 56, 82; knowledge of 
Prof. Butcher, 25; mental 
equipment, 12; subconscious 
mind, 56, 83, no; surprise 
at extracts from her auto- 
matic scripts, 49, 50; un- 
conscious knowledge from 
Mrs. Verrall, 88; vision of 
Prof. Butcher, 23; passim 

Willett scripts, 115; condi- 
tions of production, 14; 
script of Jan. 10, 1914, 5, 8, 
87; of Feb. 28, 1914, 16, 71, 
81, 88; of Mar. 2, 1914, 30, 
67, 81, 88; of Aug. 2, 1915, 
37, 73', of Aug. 19, 1915 46; 
of Mar. 2, 1914, and Aug. 2, 

1915, 104 

Zither, 30, 33, 41; sketch, 30 



